


Pictures Came and Broke Your Heart

by sistermichael



Series: The One Where the Crew Has a Betting Pool [3]
Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Blood Drinking, Clairvoyance, Communication Failure, Daydrinking, Drinking with Lilith, Gen, M/M, Metaphysics (questionable), OSHA violations left right and center, POV Outsider, Peering into the abyss, Post-Season/Series 02, Simon the Devious' nightclub, Summer Solstice, Wu Tang Clan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:40:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27627596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sistermichael/pseuds/sistermichael
Summary: What do a solstice party, a magical bath, and a whole lot of salt have to do with anything? Camera Two is about to find out in a rather unusual way...The documentary crew travels over The Fucking Bridge once again in the penultimate installment ofThe One Where the Crew Has a Betting Pool.
Relationships: Camera Two & Lilith, Guillermo de la Cruz/Camera Two, Guillermo de la Cruz/Nandor the Relentless, Nandor the Relentless/Camera Two
Series: The One Where the Crew Has a Betting Pool [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1825135
Comments: 47
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Freydient](https://archiveofourown.org/users/freydient), as usual, beta-read this with aplomb. Without her, this thing would be RIDDLED with plot holes. Any and all mistakes that remain, however, are my own. A million thanks to the Nandermo discord for inspiration/insight/perversion and to you all for reading and commenting. I can be found on tumblr @sistersasquatch.
> 
> The title is swiped shamelessly from Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star."

Fresh Kills is, strictly speaking, the estuary that runs alongside the northern edge of Staten Island. More broadly, it refers to the area containing both the estuary and the adjacent massive landfill that also bears its name. To further complicate matters, the aforementioned huge-ass landfill is in the process of being ‘reclaimed’ as a park, a phenomenon that Cecil regards with the shadiest of side-eyes. No number of walking trails and benches can truly undo the fact that it’s effectively still one giant street doodoo and not a place that Cecil would necessarily go of his own volition.

After some thorough puzzling over Google Maps on the bus, Cecil takes a best guess at what Nandor meant by the “bridge” and heads in that direction. He’s willing to bet his life that Fresh Kills is Nandor’s top-secret rendezvous location of choice purely because of the name, toxic runoff be damned. He still trudges into the park with a fair bit of trepidation, though. The air is close and muggy under the trees, and he fancies every little rustle of the leaves he hears is Nandor coming to ambush him.

It dawns on him that he’s in primo stranger-danger territory and absolutely no one knows where he is, so he takes out his phone and dashes off a quick text to Ana.

_I’m in Fresh Kills under the 140 bridge. Just in case I end up dismembered._

He hits send and pockets his phone. The screen has momentarily fucked up his night vision and for a paralyzing moment of horror he fancies he can see dozens of eyes glowing out of the darkness at him. He shakes the fear off and continues along the landfill fence on the park side. Giant hulking backhoes perch precariously on the landfill mounds, silhouetted ominously against the sky; there is a gentle, festering scent of rot that seems to get into every cell in Cecil’s lungs. He wonders, not for the first time, how the ever-loving fuck people actually jog here.

At length, he draws up next to the bridge and checks his watch. 12:54. He looks around, surveying, and finally decides to lurk behind a piece of concrete piling. Not a few moments later, there is a high-pitched shriek as a bat comes wheeling out of the sky; a puff of air later and that bat is Nandor the Relentless, cape swinging as he pants for breath that he strictly doesn’t need. He has something in his hands that he’s holding almost tenderly, as if afraid he’ll crush it.

“Guillermo,” Nandor calls softly, plaintively, and it almost makes Cecil feel sorry for him. “I promise I have come alone and unarmed.”

Before he has an opportunity to interrogate the brief cramp of guilt arising somewhere in the region of his stomach, Cecil rises to his feet and emerges from behind the piling.

“You’re not Guillermo,” says Nandor indignantly; Cecil, to his horror, can hear the raw edge of pain running through his voice. Cecil stares at Nandor’s hands and realizes that the thing he’s holding is a bouquet of roses. Nandor follows Cecil’s gaze down to the roses and flings them away as if they’ve burned him. They topple down the embankment and sink down somewhere into the swamp.

“Nope, I’m not. I just find this cloak-and-dagger shit perplexing and want to get to the bottom of things.” Cecil puts a hand to the stake he has in his back pocket (he jettisoned the camera bag behind the concrete piling because, well. Dorky). “You seem to want something specific from Guillermo. What might that be?”

And then, belatedly, he recalls the roses flung down the culvert and realizes he might be acting like just a little bit of an asshole. Nandor hisses at him as if to verify this point.

“I just wanted to talk to him. I miss him, and I don’t see any reason for him to be away from us.”

“He’s not your servant anymore, you know.” A stray car whooshes over the bridge overhead; the sound echoes through the underside of the bridge in a series of sonorous roars. “Even if he came back to you, that ship has sailed.” He’s not sure who starts it, but he and Nandor begin to circle each other, Cecil’s hand not leaving the stake.

“What do you know about the supernatural world, human? What could you know that has not occurred to me in seven hundred and fifty years of immortal life across continents and epochs?” asks Nandor, and yep, being a vampire does in fact give you the uncanny ability to go straight for the jugular. Literally and metaphorically.

“I would bet that my knowledge, for what depth it lacks, certainly has breadth.” They’re still circling each other, Cecil tripping over all kinds of tetanusy shit in the process because he doesn’t have Nandor’s night vision.

“But you lack powers,” says Nandor, befuddled. “How do you and Guillermo get along, exactly? He is so powerful, and you are so…” he flails his hands around and wrinkles his nose. “Ordinary.”

“Wow, thanks, bud,” Cecil shoots back, but a roar of panic has begun somewhere deep in his reptilian brain. This is the very thing that he’s been avoiding all this time because he doesn’t want to believe that he’s on borrowed time, that he and Guillermo are floating along in a summertime daze that must end sooner or later. (Dammit, Tanya’s _Grease_ infatuation has apparently lodged itself in the part of Cecil’s brain responsible for metaphors). The wind rustles through the trees; the jingle of dog tags from a few late-night walkers sift through the night air, and a few more cars go shooting over the bridge overhead.

“What exactly is your hang-up about me and Guillermo?” Cecil continues, sounding an awful lot braver than he feels. Especially since he just tripped on an empty beer bottle and nearly ate shit.

Nandor bristles visibly. “What cloak and dagger bullshit is this, video man? Guillermo is his own person, and it was perfectly his prerogative to have his virginity taken by the gentle local bard. And then for that local bard to continue to provide him with tender lovemaking.”

Cecil stops pacing in surprise. “That was…oddly flattering, actually.”

Nandor inclines his head in acknowledgment. “I call it like I see it, dude.” The word sounds incredibly wrong in his mouth.

“What were you going to talk about with him here tonight?” Cecil resumes pacing.

“That is none of your business.”

“It might be, actually. Since I’m more or less the person making a concerted effort to look out for his well-being at the moment.”

“I also care about his well-being!”

“I have access to hundreds of hours of footage that directly contradict that statement, but you do you, mate.” Cecil sighs, deflated. “Listen. You and I are in the same position. We both want Guillermo to be happy and safe, but we both have a massive conflict of interest. You’re a vampire who wants to be with a vampire slayer who also happens to be his former familiar; I’m a documentary filmmaker who wants to be with my, uh… supernaturally-gifted subject. Both of us are in way too deep and, if we have any sense, shouldn’t touch any of this with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole.”

“That is a very specific measurement,” Nandor puzzles. “Is it from the Greeks?”

_“The Grinch.”_

“I’m not familiar. Did he rule Macedonia in the 15th century? In that case I may have fucked him and then eaten him. He had lovely thighs.”

“Nope, probably not the same guy.”

“Hmm.” Nandor ponders this a moment, swishing his cape around in a way that Cecil is forced to admit is pretty cool. “But aren’t we enemies?”

“Because we both want the same person? Nandor, precisely how many times in your life have you been monogamous?”

Silence.

“See? You seem awfully threatened by Guillermo sleeping with me for someone who had no problem having thirty-seven wives and loving thirty-five of them, then fucking his way through the entire American presidency. I mean, _Reagan? Really?_ ”

Nandor hisses and takes a step towards Cecil, and Ana apparently decides that that precise moment is the one in which she should drop out of the nearest tree, ninja-style and very nearly directly on top of Nandor. It’s actually really impressive, once Cecil’s done having a heart attack.

Nandor does kind of shriek, which is very gratifying.

“What the fuck is this _shit_?” Nandor roars once he’s stopped screaming.

“What are you lunatics doing?” Ana demands. In the gloom, it’s hard to tell what exactly it is that she’s brandishing, but Cecil would definitely put his money on nunchucks.

“Just…chatting,” says Nandor with a meaningful glance at Cecil.

“Lies and slander,” Ana retorts.

“It’s true,” Cecil insists, once he no longer feels the need to hurl. In a sudden burst of inspiration, he continues, “We were in the process of clearing up some recent points of confusion, actually.” He tries to discreetly shift around to get feeling back in his legs after that massive adrenaline rush. “Nandor was just about to tell me how he found out that Guillermo was staying at my apartment. And for that matter, how he found out where my apartment is and decided that it would be appropriate to crash-land on my fire escape uninvited,” he adds, glaring pointedly at Nandor. “Isn’t that right, pal?”

“Oh, indubitably,” says Nandor smoothly, though Cecil is very gratified to see that Ana visibly terrifies him. “And I was just explaining that one evening, feeling bereft, I called to Guillermo through the ether and begged him to talk to me. And Guillermo told me, his words exactly, ‘I can’t talk to you right now’ and tried to sever the connection.” He looks mournfully off over the landfill.

“But then something important happened,” Cecil prompts. Turns out he’s getting more fluent in Nandorese as time goes on.

“Well, before the connection severed, I heard something in the background that allowed me to pinpoint your location with startling accuracy.”

Cecil groans. “The fucking bus.”

“I heard a disembodied mechanical voice proclaiming that the B-fifty-seven bus was travelling to Gravesend. Unfortunately, that meant very little to me. Fortunately, Colin Robinson has an encyclopedic knowledge of the bus routes of all five boroughs, plus New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Railroad. Unfortunately, he forced me to listen to quite a lot of that knowledge before he told me what I wanted. I was extremely weak by the end of it.”

Ana looks from Nandor to Cecil and back again. “But you just knew the bus route, not the specific stop,” she says slowly, puzzling it out. Unfortunately, she doesn’t lower the nunchucks as she does it. “That would take forever to narrow down. You’d have to stake out every single apartment around every single bus stop along that route. And the buzzer for Cecil’s apartment still says ‘The Reverend Prudence Higginbotham’ on it, so it’s not like you could even...”

“Yes, well, it was slightly a process of elimination!” snaps Nandor, flailing a little. Cecil and Ana look at each other and snort. Then Ana seems to suddenly remember that she’s supposed to be furious.

“You assholes do realize that this very much looked like a duel, right?” she says, rattling the nunchucks threateningly.

“A duel? This does not follow any of the proper protocols!” Nandor insists, looking scandalized.

“Really? Two dudes meeting in a park in the wee hours? Cecil with stakes in his back pocket, you in your weird leather battle dress? Doesn’t that look at all suspicious to you?”

“No,” Cecil and Nandor retort in unison. Cecil never thought he’d see the day where he and a seven-hundred-and-fifty-year-old warlord vampire are teaming up against his best friend, but, well. His life is already a dumpster fire, so what’s throwing a few more mattresses and takeout containers in said dumpster?

“What’s really going on here?” Ana demands. She’s staring directly at Cecil, which Cecil thinks is just a smidge unfair.

“Nothing’s going on,” sighs Cecil, deflated. “Nothing at all. Nandor just wanted to ask Guillermo to come back to him, for what I presume are feelings-related reasons. I intercepted the message and gate-crashed because I’m a jealous idiot. Ana, now is _not the time_ what are you—” Ana is already scrolling through a familiar spreadsheet on her phone. Cecil rolls his eyes and puts his stake back in his pocket. “Oh, for Christ’s sake…” 

“What is she doing?” inquires Nandor in confusion, leaning over and squinting. He has the decency to not deck Cecil for blasphemy. Er, reverse blasphemy. Whatever.

“Don’t worry about it,” Cecil mumbles, trying to stealthily take Ana’s phone from her. She yanks it away and smacks him in the solar plexus with the nunchucks without even removing her gaze from the screen. From what Cecil can see over her shoulder, McKenzie has substantially widened her lead, but Cecil has picked up a few points as well. For someone who’s currently canoodling with one of the subjects of the aforementioned betting pool, however, Cecil’s not doing half as well as he should be.

In the awkward lull that follows, Nandor stands there and considers the pair of them. The fetid, toxic-garbage landfill breeze stirs his cloak. Cecil wonders if he dressed up special for this—it’s hard to tell which of Nandor’s clothes he considers fancy wear, save for the giant disco ball of red velvet and gold thread that he wore to the nightclub and the Theatre des Vampires. (And the dildo-studded bondage wear, which Cecil fervently wishes didn’t take up as much real estate in his brain as it does). Either way, it can’t be comfy inside all that leather.

“Are you going to tell Guillermo?” Cecil asks at last, relenting a bit.

Nandor cocks his head in confusion. “About what?”

He gestures around at the swamp and the underpass. “This. You and me, fighting over him like a couple of turkeys. Ana dropping out of the sky and scaring the shit out of both of us with her nunchucks.”

Nandor draws himself up to his full height. “Are _you_ going to tell Guillermo, since you’re apparently now his self-proclaimed protector?”

Cecil doesn’t have an answer for that one. Ana eyes him.

“Stop being my moral compass already,” he mumbles in her general direction. He turns back to Nandor. “I asked you first, and I think you’ll find if we do the math that I technically have the moral high ground here. Not by much, I grant you--”

“How _dare_ you insist upon your own righteousness—” hisses Nandor, drawing up to his full height.

“Yup, time to go,” says Ana, finally looking up from her phone and grabbing Cecil’s arm. She drags him bodily away, leaving Nandor standing there in motionless fury to watch them go. They stumble back down the trail in irate silence and Ana shoves Cecil into her extremely-illegally-parked Subaru.

“What the hell were you thinking?” she hisses, slamming it straight into second gear and peeling out into traffic before Cecil’s even thought to look for his seatbelt. All of the assorted random shit she keeps in the backseat clatters around like bingo balls in a cage; Cecil definitely takes an emergency flare and bell pepper to the head.

“Clearly, I wasn’t,” he mumbles into the dashboard. Ana clucks and takes the onramp to the fucking bridge. The lights of Staten Island recede away as they head up and over the water. They drive nearly the whole length of the bridge until Cecil remembers that basic manners were a thing that he used to have. “Thanks, by the way. In case I hadn’t said that already. I’ll Venmo you for the toll,” he says quietly.

Ana sighs and reaches over to squeeze his thigh comfortingly. Cecil really wishes she’d use that hand for shifting gears instead, but he appreciates the sentiment.

*

The hour before dawn finds Cecil tossing and turning in bed, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. The tide of denial on which he had floated for so long is now threatening to drag him under. He’s rationally known a lot of things for a long time. Chief among them is that Guillermo’s heart has belonged to someone else for the better part of a decade, and Cecil is just a warm body and a sympathetic mind that presented themselves at a nadir in Guillermo’s life. He’d known this; Ana had also known this and, because she’s the best friend he’s ever had, tried to warn him about this, emphatically and with much gesturing. But, Christ, how he had wanted, and that wanting overrode all else.

Through his reverie he hears the sound of the key in the lock and the particular jingle of the other keys on Guillermo’s ring. God knows what doors those keys unlock. Guillermo has alluded to several storage units in the Bronx full of holy water, and that seems to be the most normal thing among them. It’s just one of a whole phalanx of communication issues, but Cecil supposes that’s all likely over now anyway. The apartment door opens and shuts softly; Guillermo avoids the creaky spots on the floor and so moves through the apartment as if on a breath. Cecil sighs, flops onto his back, and resigns himself to his fate.

“Hi,” says Guillermo softly, sliding under the covers with him.

“Hi,” Cecil answers tonelessly.

“Are you angry with me?” Guillermo asks.

“I want to be, but it’s really myself that I’m furious with. I knew that I was getting into something that was doomed from the start. And yet.” Cecil speaks the words to the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, trying not to think about all the times he’s looked up at them while he and Guillermo were engaged in activities involving fewer clothes and a hell of a lot more dopamine and personal lubricant. “I thought that the pain would be worth it…that finally getting to have you would outweigh the heartache of knowing I couldn’t keep you.”

Guillermo is silent for a moment. Presently, he ventures, “It’s not that clear-cut.”

“Seems fairly clear-cut to me. You came to me to fill a need, I didn’t have the self-restraint to say no, and then we got in over our heads even though we both knew that this was never going to work.”

Guillermo groans and shifts onto his back, staring up at the stars. “That’s not how it went.”

“Oh, really? How did it go, exactly? Enlighten me.” Cecil is thrumming with sick anger to the point that he doesn’t feel the light touch on the back of his hand for a moment; once he does, he grudgingly interlaces his fingers with Guillermo’s, still not looking at him.

“I’ve always been fond of you. You know that.” Guillermo sighs. “And apparently your editor does as well.”

“Don’t worry about that. Rick’s like a bloodhound for gay shit. He can scent it a million miles away.”

“To me, you represented what a normal life could look like. You represented the kind of person that I would want to be with. And as my entire world has exploded around me, I selfishly wanted to feel some semblance of that life, even if just as a pale imitation. The whole time we’ve been doing this, I’ve felt horrible for using you because I care so very deeply for you.”

“But you could never love me.”

“Love isn’t an either-or scenario. There are so many gradients to it, and so many choices that shape it. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the last eleven years, it’s that.” Guillermo releases a breath. “Please forgive me.”

“Was there ever a possibility of this--” Cecil gestures up at the stars— “Becoming your life? Get out of the slaying game, get a regular job, and…stay? With me?”

“I would say so. Yes. A very strong one, at that.”

“Put a percentage on it. Fifty-fifty? Eighty-twenty? Tell me.”

“Cecil, don’t torture yourself.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but torturing myself is sort of what I do.” He’s on the verge of hysteria now, the greenish glow of the stars throbbing in his vision. “For Christ’s sake, we spent two years flirting with each other through the camera, even though I knew…” He trails off, lost. He changes tacks slightly and tries again. “Rick sent out the rough cut of the second series the other day, and he said he always knows when it was me behind the camera because of how you looked at me—for reassurance, for commiseration, for anything.”

Guillermo makes a pained noise.

“He referred to it as ‘eyefucking.’”

Guillermo makes an even more pained noise.

“So you know, I was really, really confused. Because on the one hand, you were clearly pining for someone else. But, Christ, the way you looked at me…it made me feel like I could look back.”

Guillermo squeezes his hand tighter. “You could. You can. I swear.”

“Do you believe in destiny?” Cecil asks the ceiling. There’s a sharp intake of breath from the other side of the bed. “Just to complicate your Catholic existential crisis a little.”

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

“What, stake now, ask questions later?”

The silence he gets in response tells him he’s hit a rather sensitive nail on the head with an entire baseball bat and, in the spirit of the thing, he doesn’t push it further.

“What are we going to do?” asks Cecil at length, quietly. “Now that you’re going back to Nandor.”

“Excuse me, I’m not _going bac_ k to anybody.”

Cecil turns onto his side to peer at Guillermo in the gloom. “Wait.”

Guillermo shrugs. “What makes you think that my only choices are you or him?”

Cecil doesn’t have an answer to that one, so Guillermo apparently takes that as an opening to give as good as he gets.

“What about you? Got your eye on anybody?”

“Jesus, dude. Give me a minute. Still heartbroken over here, thanks.”

“Your dating pool is substantially larger than mine,” Guillermo rejoins.

“Is not!”

Guillermo is silent for a moment, then he ventures, “You and Ana would never—”

“God, no!” Cecil laughs wetly through an unexpected sniffle. “That’s really, really not the dynamic there.”

“Well, Demetrius is very good looking. And the dude really knows his way around a Steadicam…”

“Oh my god, you utter asshole, stop trying to set me up with my coworkers!” A playful shove turns into a full-on wrestling match.

“If you’ve got a taste for the supernatural now, some of those werewolves are pretty good looking. Or Sherman the Merman! He seemed. Um... Fit.” Guillermo giggles, and ouch Cecil was not ready for the realization that this is what he’ll miss: these small moments when Guillermo’s guard goes down and he’s happy and it’s Cecil who’s brought him there.

They lie in silence for a while; eventually, Cecil turns onto his side and snuggles into Guillermo’s chest, because he may be angry but he’s not a fool. Guillermo strokes his back and plays with his hair and Cecil feels a little sick that he’s about to lose this. At length, Guillermo speaks. It sounds reluctant and guilty.

“I can’t tell you why, but I have to ask about that time at Simon the Devious’ nightclub.”

Cecil groans and tries to bury his face further into Guillermo’s chest. Guillermo sighs and squeezes him tightly. “Please. It’s important.”

Cecil groans even louder. And then he begins to speak, because, well, he’s a pushover and a romantic and also probably kind of an idiot.


	2. Chapter 2

The next day, Cecil barges into Satchel Serafina without knocking. In his defense, it _is_ an establishment open to the public, albeit to a clientele that doesn’t have all that much in common with him.

“You’re the cameraman who follows Guillermo around!” Judith says excitedly, swaying out from behind the counter. “What can I do for you?”

“I have a question. Of a semi-witchy nature.”

She lights up. “Would you like to become a witch?”

“No thank—wait. I can become a witch?”

She shrugs. “Sure.”

“Whoa. Okay. Let’s put a pin in that one for the moment, but definitely circle back to it. No, my question is about…well, it’s about vampire stuff. And I think Lilith is the only one who can answer it. Is she in?”

*

Lilith is indeed in. She pours Cecil tea from an extremely old and elaborate tea set, then adds a liberal amount of whiskey. Cecil wonders if his misery is that apparent. It’s actually quite cozy, sitting underneath the wrought stone arches of the crypt and watching the candlelight flicker across the walls.

“No weird sex incense or semen harvesting,” he warns, breaking a gingersnap in half and dunking it in his tea.

“Darling, I know that you regularly test the upper bounds of the Kinsey scale and not even weapons-grade magic could persuade you to tap this. It’s not like your semen has any extraordinary properties, either.”

“Wow, thanks. You’re really turning on the charm today,” Cecil mutters dourly.

She takes a coy sip of her tea. “Just calling it like it is.”

“And there’s nothing unbecoming in my tea, right?”

“Pinky promise.” He takes the proffered pinkie in his own and they drink in silence for a moment.

“This visit isn’t for the documentary,” Cecil begins, shifting awkwardly in his chair.

“I thought as much.” Lilith’s smile looks predatory, but Cecil strongly suspects that it just always looks like that. Resting Danger Smile, if you will.

“You’ve had sex with at least two vampires,” he blurts out. Then stops, because that wasn’t exactly the smoothest opening.

“At least.” Lilith inclines her head graciously, in a way that indicates that asking for the comprehensive list would result in them sitting here for a very, very long time.

“Have you ever been bitten by one?” Cecil asks.

Lilith’s smile turns from coy into what the young people of today might call ‘cheesing.’ “Only for sexual purposes.”

Cecil’s brain shorts out a little bit. He takes a lengthy sip of his tea to try and cover his intellectual faceplant. Once he’s done dying inside, he ventures, “I mean, in my experience those things are a bit…well, coterminous.”

She sets her teacup down on the saucer with a clatter. “You’ve been bitten. Oh, this is very interesting.” She leans close, conspiratorial. “Did you come?”

Blessedly, the whiskey seems to finally be doing its job. Cecil giggles a little. “In my pants like a teenager. In front of all of my coworkers, no less.”

She tosses one leg over the other and reaches for the bottle of whiskey. “Oh, darling. You must tell me more.”

*

**Two Years Ago**

Cecil and Doug the sound tech (R.I.P.) are tailing Guillermo through Simon the Devious’ nightclub, scampering ahead through the strobing light and pounding bass and trying to keep him in frame.

“There you are. Had my eye on you all night, little one.” A weird leather vampire accosts Guillermo on the stairs. There’s something up with the vampire’s teeth and his eyes, sure, but Cecil is more concerned with the atomic chafing potential of that leather vest.

“Oh, oh, I’m just…” Guillermo stammers, looking to Cecil as if for backup.

“Well whatever you ‘just,’ you just found it right here. Sweet release from life.” The vampire smiles as if he’s just offered Guillermo the moon. It’s fucking terrifying.

“Uh, I like life. And I’m just, uh...” Guillermo looks around frantically for an excuse.

“Guillermo!” says Nandor, swirling imperiously to the top of the stairs.

“Something I can help you with, friend?” growls Scary Leather Vampire.

“Uh, well, not really, but…” Nandor looks completely at a loss for what should be an extraordinarily clear-cut situation. Cecil and Doug shrug at each other and keep rolling.

“Oh!” Comprehension dawns on Scary Leather Vampire’s face. “Were you gonna... _rrrrr!_ Cause I was thinkin’ _rrrrrrr_!” He does a paw swipe gesture which does look kind of silly, though in his defense, Cecil doesn’t know whether it’s possible to do it menacingly if one isn’t an actual tiger.

“Okay. Well, okay.” Nandor shifts from foot to foot nervously.

“Yeah?”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t.” In Cecil’s not-so-humble opinion, it comes out far too apologetic, given the circumstances.

“Why?”

“Well, he’s kind of my familiar,” Nandor stutters.

Scary Leather Vampire recoils just a little bit. “How could I know?” He chuckles nervously.

“No, I—honest, mistake, you don’t have to apologize,” Nandor rushes out.

“I will. I must apologize, I’m so sorry. I-I—”

“Fine, honestly, look, if you really had your heart set on it, don’t let me stand in your way.”

“Well, I’d love to…”

“What?” Guillermo throws a panicked glance at Cecil through the camera. Cecil feels like all of his organs have fallen out and into the mosh pit. Nandor and Scary Leather Vampire babble pathetically at each other for a bit longer, Scary Leather Vampire takes his leave, and Cecil wonders if throwing up in this club is an ejectable offense.

As Scary Leather Vampire departs, Guillermo narrows his eyes at Nandor. “Wooooow,” Guillermo half-shouts over the din of the music.

“No, I wasn’t going to let him eat you,” Nandor gripes helplessly. 

Guillermo pushes past Nandor on the stairs without looking at him.

“Guillermo!” calls Nandor after him as he disappears into the crush of bodies.

Nandor looks at Cecil and grimaces, fangs showing. Cecil and Doug look helplessly down the stairs at Demetrius and Kara, who have been covering Nandor from below. As one, Demetrius and Kara touch their pointer fingers to their noses.

“Dammit,” mumbles Cecil. He always loses nose-goes. He and Doug take off through the crowd.

The beat is pulsating, and lights strobing pinks and blues over the sea of bodies. It appears that the hooking-up part of the night has begun in earnest; the door to the sex room is wide open and a mass of writhing vampires is spilling out through it. The interior contains a huge number of squashy red velvet sofas and a lot of corpses, as well as a ton of sexual implements that Cecil can’t name and quite frankly doesn’t care to.

Guillermo is short and Cecil is short, so this is really not going so well; Cecil blindly follows Doug, who is blessed with some white-people Sasquatch tendencies, through the crowd, banking on Doug and the boom mike to clear the way and give vampires pause long enough for the two of them to escape unscathed.

Here and there they see flashes of Guillermo’s dun-colored coat through the cloud, sticking out on account of the fact that it’s not brightly colored, sparkly, and/or fetish wear. He’s heading for the exit.

They’re losing him, though. Cecil makes a split-second decision and lowers the camera, cradling it to his chest and using it as something of a battering ram to barge through the crowd. Doug shrugs and follows suit, doing haymakers with the boom mike with frighteningly casual ease.

Thanks to his unfairly long legs, Doug makes it to the edge of the crowd before Cecil does; he turns around expectantly for Cecil, who is making to follow when hands close around his shoulders.

“Where are you going?” purrs a voice against his neck.

 _OSHA’s going to have a shit fit_ is the last thing Cecil thinks before he feels arms close around him from behind and two sharp points slice into the skin of his neck. His knees give out underneath him; his eyes flit wildly around the room as if looking for his salvation and, miracle of miracles (or not), they lock with Guillermo’s, who has reemerged from the crowd and is looking back in terror.

The bite hurts like an absolute bitch, like two Zumba-dancing phlebotomists on speed have just stabbed him in the neck. Cecil thrashes wildly in the vampire’s hold even though he can feel how ludicrously ineffective it is. 

And then he just…stops caring.

An unbelievable sensation starts washing over him. On a practical level, he’s completely paralyzed--but there’s far more to it than that. To put it crudely but accurately, Cecil is the most turned-on he’s ever been in his life, a crushing wave of pleasure and joy dragging him sweetly along in its wake. There’s a blinding sensation that everything is going to be not only alright but groovy, phenomenal, wonderful, superb. To Cecil’s perpetually-existentially-anxious millennial brain, the feeling is nothing short of catnip. The Cecil of this moment is still two years away from giggling like a loon while sharing pot brownies with Guillermo, so he’s never felt anything like this, ever. The camera has long since fallen to the ground, and time seems to slow as Cecil sinks deeper and deeper into the feeling. His eyes once again seek out Guillermo’s in the crowd, brown and brilliant and unfortunately looking real freaked out right now. Technically, Cecil supposes, he’s manifesting physical signs of being unbearably turned on and also has the small problem of a set of fangs embedded in his neck and drawing an indeterminate amount of blood out, but he’s too floaty to care. Even the scent of his captor is amazing; hard to place, but as if he’s smelled the world’s headiest cologne coupled with sheer pheromones. He closes his eyes and swoons in the strong arms holding him up; he realizes woozily that he’s actually being cradled, a surprisingly gentle hand stroking at his lower back as the waves of pleasure wash over him. It feels wonderful.

And then there’s a horrible tearing pain in his neck and the warm presence at his back is gone and he crashes down onto his knees in the cold air, the world spinning and grief surging over him.

Cecil cradles his face in his hands, gasping in great lungfuls of air as his neck sears. He has no idea how much blood he’s lost, but it definitely feels like rather more than the Red Cross would in good conscience take. There doesn’t appear to be a nurse waiting nearby with cookies and grape juice, either.

He also realizes as he gradually reemerges into the world that he’s totally come in his pants.

“Cecil!” says a voice urgently, a hand coming to rest on his cheek. He looks up. It’s Guillermo, and the realization crashes down on him that, holy shit, he’s totally come in his pants with a vampire’s fangs in his neck and his eyes locked on Guillermo’s.

Cecil looks down at his front and up at Guillermo—sort of. It’s hard, given the strobing lights and the Daddy Yankee blasting everywhere and the fact that he’s just had an orgasm while severely deprived of blood. (How does that even work, biologically? The male body has clearly, against all logic and reason, evolved to vote against its own interests.)

“Pinche cabrón,” Guillermo swears, crashing to his knees to get a better look at Cecil. “Cecil. Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Cecil murmurs woozily, struggling to keep his gaze on Guillermo’s. “Funny isn’t it… after all that, I’m the one who got…uh, _rrrrrr’d_?” He tries to do Scary Leather Vampire’s paw-swipe motion but ends up just sort of flapping his hand very weakly. He struggles to sit back on his haunches.

“Hey, hey, easy,” says Doug, kneeling next to them. He presses the inside of his wrist to Cecil’s forehead—sweet, but very clearly not going to diagnose anything even remotely related to what ails Cecil right now. Guillermo is watching Cecil with a wild, dark intensity; he looks like he’s right on the edge of blurting something back and holding on by sheer, fraying willpower.

“Yeah, felt amazing,” Cecil grits out in response to the question he just knows is pressing at the forefront of Guillermo’s mind. “Still feels like I’m on some very excellent drugs, s’matter of fact.”

Guillermo laughs nervously. “Oh. Well, that’s something, at least.”

“And, yes, you definitely just saw me come in my pants.”

Guillermo laughs even more nervously, tries to look away, and ends up spectacularly blinding himself with the beam of a pink strobe light that swings into his line of sight at precisely the wrong time.

“It’s fine,” Cecil says, struggling to take in air. “I don’t think he got much blood out of me. I mean, if I was able to still direct blood flow to a certain, uh, area… I’m fine, I swear.” That’s definitely a lie. He still feels that profound riptide of loss and grief trying to drag him under, and as whatever euphoria drugs are in vampire saliva begin to fade, an utter bitch of a pain in his neck. Guillermo puts a comforting hand on his back.

“Magic shit is real weird,” Cecil murmurs in his own defense, aware sort of that he’s probably not supposed to be mansplaining this to someone who’s been in servitude to a vampire for a decade. He scrutinizes Guillermo. “Have you ever done that?”

“Done what?’

“Been drunk. Eaten? I have no idea. Beats me.”

Guillermo shakes his head. He bites his lip anxiously and once again doesn’t seem to know where to look.

“Really? Never? Not at all?”

“Nope.”

“You’ve never been, I don’t know, snowed into the house or something, and Nandor got snacky?” asks Doug incredulously. He’s flung his audio bag somewhere by the wall, Guillermo appears to be actually sitting on Cecil’s camera, and this is all very clearly off the record, so by damn, Doug is carpe-ing that particular diem into the ground.

Guillermo shakes his head again. “No. Never.” He’s back to doing that thing where he can’t seem to take his eyes off Cecil. “Here, let me find you something to drink.”

“I got it, I got it,” says Rosario frantically from somewhere above Cecil’s head, literally baseball-sliding onto the scene. Once she’s done nearly kicking Doug in the face while stealing third, she cracks open a can of soda and shoves it into Cecil’s hands. Tanya’s suddenly there too, pushing his hair off his neck and pressing something to the puncture wounds. Cecil groans at the knowledge that the whole damn crew is apparently going to witness the aftermath of the weirdest orgasm of his life. In the absence of anything better to do (and also to cover up his complete humiliation), he takes a sip out of the can and grimaces. “Squirt? Really?”

Rosario swats him gently upside the head. “Do you know how hard it is to find anything that can be consumed by a human in a vampire-only nightclub, asshole? You don’t want to know where that came from.” She too presses the inside of her wrist to his forehead. “How much blood did you lose?”

“Gee, let me find that vampire and ask,” Cecil snarks.

Doug snorts. “I was trying to pull him off of you for a while, man. But shit, vampires are strong. I couldn’t do it.”

Cecil looks around. “Wait, if you didn’t pull him off…” He looks frantically around at the faces ringing him, but the one he’s searching for is absent. In one motion, he lunges to his feet and throws the camera onto his shoulder, staggering a little (read: a lot). There are unanimous protests from those assembled, but he ignores them in favor of grabbing Doug by the sleeve and forcibly towing him towards the emergency exit he’d conveniently noticed while coming his brains out.

This was definitely all a Very Bad Idea because the room is spinning with great velocity and Cecil is sticky in some rather intimate places, but he plows ahead anyway. They all spill out the club’s side door just in time to see Guillermo at the far end of the alley, striding away with his hands in his pockets. Just as they start haring after him in earnest (Tanya still applying pressure to Cecil’s neck and running more-or-less in tandem with him), Nandor bats out of the air and strides fluidly after Guillermo. Cecil presses his eye to the camera and starts rolling, narrowly avoiding throwing up in the process.

“Guillermo.” Nandor turns around for a split-second without stopping, points at Cecil, and mouths “one moment.” Tanya takes the opportunity to apply even more pressure to the wound.

Guillermo slows to a stop and tosses a glance to Cecil. Cecil is not yet fluent in Guillermoese; he will later realize that this particular look means ‘would you get a load of this horseshit?’

Nandor draws up alongside Guillermo and turns to face him. Guillermo watches him impassively.

“You’re still angry about that vampire who tried to eat you, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t deny it. I can tell.”

“I said yes,” says Guillermo with a touch more force.

“See? I knew it!” crows Nandor.

Guillermo tosses another glance to Cecil.

“Guillermo. I’m sorry for how I treated you tonight. I appreciate you. I really do,” says Nandor, low.

“Well, you have a funny way of showing it sometimes.”

“Thank you. But…I’m going to make it up to you tonight.”

Nandor extends a hand and Guillermo tentatively rests his own, gloved, on top of it. Doug mouths holy shit in Cecil’s direction as Nandor cradles Guillermo from behind and the two of them take off into the night.

Later, Rick will, in a stroke of gay editing genius, overlay some cheesy, lovey, 80s-esque pop on the subsequent sequence of Nandor flying with Guillermo (and dropping him nearly to his death, and then also the credits because if you’re paying royalties anyway, you milk that shit for all it’s worth). To hear Demetrius and Kara tell the tale, they’d heroically raced up a million flights of stairs and hung very illegally out the window of a schmancy executive office to get that shot, but, whatever. Cecil got bit in the line of duty, so he still wins.

*

Cecil is sitting in the emergency room’s waiting area holding an ice pack to his neck and listening to Rosario having a very heated phone call with the Worker’s Comp people when a general kerfuffle breaks out near the entrance. He (along with the rest of the waiting room) turns around just in time to see Nandor, Laszlo, Nadja, Demetrius, and Kara burst through the revolving door en masse and very, very loudly. Capes are flying, thick European accents are shouting, and the boom mike definitely cracks a ceiling light when Nandor swats it with his hand in the commotion.

“I’m…going to have to call you back,” says Rosario slowly to Worker’s Comp, hanging up without waiting for an answer.

Somehow, through a great deal of loud babbling over each other, the vampires manage to communicate that Nandor dropped Guillermo onto a tree and then a food truck and that he’s consequently been brought to this hospital by ambulance. (Also that Kara managed to snag the hot paramedic’s phone number). Cecil groans and shuts his eyes, overwhelmed.

Laszlo starts, as if seeing him for the first time. “I say, old chap, did you get bit?”

In lieu of an answer, Cecil lifts up the ice pack so Laszlo can see for himself.

“Well I’ll be damned. Good stuff, innit? Gets you nice and tingly in all the right places.” He winks lasciviously. Rosario fails to muffle her snort. Cecil groans again and shuts his eyes.

He misses the rest of the evening’s filming for puncture-wounds reasons and watches the dailies while on his week of paid sick leave, drugged-up, tetanus-shotted, and surrounded by giant bunches of “Get Well Soon” balloons. He’s sick as a dog from the antibiotics, and it’s probably for the best that he’s watching it on the sofa in the comfort of his own home because he doesn’t quite know what to do with his face. Some of that is doubtless due to the truly massive amount of drugs he’s on, but he’s beginning to suspect that his response to the sight of Guillermo prone and moaning on a hospital bed goes beyond mere sympathy among acquaintances.

*

**The Present**

“So,” Cecil sighs, staring into his empty teacup as if it has answers in it. (Given that he’s sitting in Witch HQ, it just might). “That was that. The Baron ate Doug shortly afterwards, and that was the end of our rad bromance.” 

“Whoa.” Lilith leans back in her chair. Cecil is more than a little pleased that his sexcapades have managed to stun the horniest witch of them all.

“Your turn,” he says, pouring himself more tea and snagging another gingersnap. “It’s only fair.”

Lilith smiles and tosses her hair. “I’m afraid my side is not nearly as titillating as yours.”

“I highly doubt that.”

She steals his teacup and takes a sip. “Well, when Nadja and I used to do the horizontal tango, erotic blood-drinking was occasionally something of which she and I partook. It was quite transcendent.”

Cecil very nearly spit-takes all over Lilith, which is probably a super bad idea considering that her clothes look extremely dry-clean only.

“Really?”

She nods. “Really-really. Not enough to be dangerous, mind. And I’m a witch, so I have certain ways of safeguarding against ill effects.” She puts her hand on his. “Not all of us get jumped in a nightclub full of vampires.”

“Did you feel…changed, afterwards? Maybe permanently?”

“Darling, I’m a witch. I’m infinitely changeable.” She plays gently with his fingers on the tabletop. “Did it ruin sex for you?”

Cecil shakes his head vigorously. “Not as such, it just…gave me a different perspective. Made me wonder about certain things.”

“And which things might those be?”

“Well, for starters, I’m…well, human. Unextraordinary semen, as you were kind enough to point out. But for a brief moment, I was able to feel, in a small way, the way it is to exist on another plane entirely. The supernatural one, in short.” He swallows. “It showed me how different that world is. And how insufficient I must appear next to it.”

“This is about Guillermo, isn’t it?”

He startles. “How…?”

“Bitch, please. You just told me a story about staring into his eyes as you had an earth-shattering, vampire-bite-induced orgasm.”

Cecil lets his forehead hit the table with a thunk. He has no idea what’s in this whiskey, but it’s doing things to him.

Lilith pauses, clearly doing some mental math with feelings. And then her face breaks open a little bit, with pity and fondness and something else that Cecil can’t quite name. “Oh, darling. You’re caught in the middle.”

He sighs. “It’s that obvious?”

“My dear, it’s not like you need scrying to see that shit from a mile away. Guillermo is so obviously and heartbreakingly torn between becoming a vampire and annihilating vampires. The only other person I know who’s had such a tumultuous relationship between the supernatural and the mundane parts of themselves is Black Peter, and he’s already left to run a barcade upstate. He’s doing quite well. Sent us a postcard from Niagara Falls.” 

“…I’m sorry?”

“Okay, yes, well, I did actually scry that, because it’s fascinating. Little vampire slayer, in love with his master. Hereditary enemies, star-crossed and both so incredibly oblivious. How will this end? I’m certainly riveted. That’s part of the reason I let Guillermo go on with the mason-jars-full-of-semen scheme. Although…” she considers. “That actually has been quite lucrative. We’ve been able to set up a subscription service.” She shakes her head, seemingly returning to the matter at hand. “So you and Guillermo…?”

Cecil swallows heavily. “Yeah,” he says numbly, feeling like a massive fool. He sets his teacup back down in the saucer.

“How long?”

“Since April. But now, not anymore, apparently. Which I should’ve seen coming, considering the crew has been betting extensively since February on whether they’ll get together, and the spreadsheet seems to be very much prophesying that they will. But then Guillermo went rogue and started showing up on my doorstep, and I foolishly thought there may have been a chance, however far-fetched. But now it’s all come apart, and I don’t know where to go from here.”

“He needed a harbor in the storm. And that’s what you were,” Lilith points out with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Also, I may want to get in on this betting pool. I won’t cheat, I promise.”

Cecil rests his chin in his palm. “It just seems like the storm is getting started, though.” He gestures helplessly, nearly taking out the entire tea set in the process. “I don’t know why I’ve been cast adrift. I mean, we hadn’t even figured out why he’d started glowing, for Christ’s sake.”

Lilith stops with her teacup halfway to her lips. “Sorry?”

“It just doesn’t make sense that this is happening now. I mean, it might...maybe I’ve just been in the dark for too long running around with the werewolves and—”

“No, no, the other bit.”

“The glowing?”

“If you’d be so kind.”

“Yeah, he…glows. During. Um. Sex. Which is very confusing for everyone, I assure you. Not a deal-breaker, mind...”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“He doesn’t know what to make of it either. It definitely freaks him out a little.”

“That’s not the part that doesn’t make sense.”

“What do you mean?”

“You shouldn’t have been able to see that.”

Cecil sits back and considers that one for a moment. “Because I’m unextraordinary?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but…” She shrugs.

That’s certainly...a development. “So why could I, then?” He stops as the ramifications start to cascade in his brain. “...and does that mean I can see other things, too?” 

“Shall we try to find out?” Lilith stands and offers her hand. Cecil takes it and allows himself to be pulled to his feet.


	3. Chapter 3

Lilith leads Cecil up a spiral staircase whose general loopiness reinforces the fact that they’ve both probably had a little too much to drink: there’s a lot of giggling and swaying and grabbing the railing and/or each other for balance. They’re climbing into what appears to be a turret, which is odd considering they’re still probably somewhere within a crappy little storefront in Brooklyn.

“Realistically, I shouldn’t be following you to a second location,” Cecil points out rather un-diplomatically as he fumbles to open the ornate door at the top of the stairs. “Considering you have been known to kidnap vampires for their semen.”

Lilith snickers, reaching around him to jiggle the knob in the correct way and give it a kick. “You shouldn’t, except for the fact that I have nothing to gain from you.”

“I don’t know, man. You could very well be masterminding some elaborate ruse that involves brainwashing me to get access to Guillermo to upset the grand balance of the universe or something…”

Lilith snorts. “I have very little interest in swaying the grand balance of the universe, I’ll have you know. Mostly I watch it from the sidelines with popcorn.” The door gives way at last and they’re in a cozy turret room, hung with draperies and lit by candles that Cecil fervently hopes weren’t blazing away unattended this entire time. Lilith crosses the room to a second door and nudges it open.

“Make yourself cozy,” she calls over her shoulder. Cecil thinks he hears a faucet kick on, but he’s a bit busy inspecting the staggering amount of occult paraphernalia surrounding him. Bunches of herbs hang from the ceiling; there are a few spindly tables around the room, with various numbers of chairs drawn up to them, as well as a number of couches, squashy armchairs and, in one corner, an elaborate bed of carved mahogany that has moonlight-blue star spangled curtains drawn around it. On the shelves there’s all sorts of miscellany, including but not limited to skulls, candles, herbs, magnifying glasses, crystals, packs of tarot cards, a half-eaten bag of Skittles, a few crumpled bodega receipts, a bottle of hand sanitizer, and—he recoils for a moment—a live snake calmly threading its way through the chaos.

“That’s Giuseppe. He's a bit poisonous,” says Lilith from the doorway. “Your bath’s drawn, by the way.”

Cecil starts. “My—sorry?”

She sighs. “You can’t just scry unpurified, you cretin. I’m already pushing some boundaries by letting you do it on a hunch alone. The least you can do is be clean for it.”

Cecil discreetly sniffs an armpit. Lilith rolls her eyes. “Not like that.”

He wanders over and peers into the room behind her. It is indeed an ornate bathroom, with a giant bathtub and fancy tiles on the walls and a towel warmer and not-from-Rite-Aid candles and everything (though the countertop does have the requisite jumble of toiletries all over it). The bathtub is already nearly full, an herbal scent that Cecil can’t place heavy in the humid air; either Lilith did some witchery or merely texted ahead to someone who’s since vanished.

“I’m going to get set up,” she says, giving him a gentle nudge into the room. “You take a bath. Don’t stay in there for less than twenty minutes. Otherwise it doesn’t work.” The door closes behind her with a snap.

Cecil is having some doubts, chief among them the fact that he’s about to strip naked and enter a tub full of substances of an unknown nature in the presence of a witch who is not above a wee bit of kidnapping and semen extraction. On the other hand, she’s already said that he has nothing to offer her and, well, the bath smells really nice and he is very, very tired. By this time of year he’d be exhausted even if he hadn’t just had what feels like an entire part of himself carved out and tossed away, and he’s teetering between nothing mattering at all and everything mattering far too much. So Cecil strips and climbs into the tub.

It feels heavenly. He sinks down into it, clouds of steam rising around him. He knows fuck-all about herbs, so he can’t quite identify them, but it smells really nice. A few jars have been left on the lip of the tub with instructions on them regarding the application of their contents. He dutifully scrubs and slathers according to the directives, then slides further down into the water and, against his better judgment, lets his mind start to wander.

*

**A few weeks ago**

Even though he’d consistently been turning up at Cecil’s doorstep covered in gore that needed dealing with, Guillermo had been hesitant about utilizing the actual bathtub function of the bathtub at first. The shower stuff had been fine, because everyone had been vertical and under a spray of water and ostensibly there for cleanliness purposes. But when Cecil attempted to do the whole bath-with-candles-and-wine thing, there had been a strange and completely unexpected moment of panic from Guillermo. Cecil had been hesitant to drill down into it, but he felt compelled to investigate given he had a half-full bathtub and a half-panicking Guillermo and both of those things were veering dangerously close to overflowing. 

“Hey, hey, what’s up?” he asked, pulling Guillermo into his arms.

“Nothing,” Guillermo lied extremely blatantly.

“That is a flagrant untruth,” Cecil pointed out, burying his face in Guillermo’s trembling shoulder. “What’s really up?”

Guillermo mumbled something that Cecil doesn’t quite catch.

“Sorry, what?”

He mumbled again.

“Dude, I’m sorry, but I really, really can’t hear you.”

“’Fraid I’ll crush you,” Guillermo whispered at last.

Cecil let out a breath he wasn’t aware he was holding. “Oh, _Guillermo._ ”

There had been some crying (from both of them) and some enforced eye-closing (for Cecil), but eventually there were two people in a bathtub, multiple orgasms on both ends, and zero candles knocked over, which Cecil counts as a win under the vast majority of circumstances.

*

Now, coming back to himself in Lilith’s bathtub, Cecil sighs and reaches for the loofah. Might as well save himself the shower later.

“Think Guillermo thoughts!” Lilith calls cheerily through the door. Cecil startles, sending water sloshing over the sides. “But please do clean up after yourself if those thoughts get a little too exciting.” Her footsteps retreat and Cecil sighs and sinks back into the water.

Once the water has cooled and Cecil is appropriately pruney, he snags a towel off the rack and dismounts from the bathtub. The towel smells nice (apparently Lilith doesn’t source her detergent from dusty bodega shelves like the rest of New York) and he takes probably longer than strictly necessary to dry himself. There’s a long midnight-blue dressing gown hanging over the back of the door and he shrugs it on, tying it with one hand and nudging open the bathroom door with the other. From the sofa next to the fireplace, Lilith sniffs the air appreciatively. “Better,” she says approvingly. She gestures to the rug in front of the hearth, where a fire that definitely wasn’t there before is roaring away. Cecil sinks down to the floor, trying to keep his knees very, very close together in light of the fact he isn’t wearing any underwear. Behind him, Lilith has risen to her feet and is moving about, murmuring and lighting candles and burning eve more freaking herbs. He shivers a little and then sneezes violently enough to make the fire gutter.

“All right, love,” Lilith says gently, though she does toss him a despairing look for the sneeze. “Look into the fire and relax your mind. Let it go completely blank, except for the thing about which you seek answers.”

Cecil leans forward and stares into the flames until his eyes start to water. He never did Boy Scouts and, New York apartment living being what it is, has spent very little time in front of burning stuff. He didn’t realize how hot it would make his face.

“Breathe,” Lilith instructs. He breathes, coughing a little on the woodsmoke, and then just about has a fucking heart attack. There, in the flames, moving indistinct but becoming ever-clearer, are forms--human forms (or, given the course his goddamn life has taken lately, quite possibly non-human forms). Forgetting himself, he reaches out as if to touch. Mercifully, whatever self-preservation reflexes he has left force him to snatch his hand back before he actively sticks it into a fire.

“See something?” Lilith murmurs, pleased. He hears the click of the kettle going on.

“Yeah,” he croaks, leaning closer.

It’s incredibly low-res, but definitely Guillermo. He’s kneeling on the ground with Nandor knelt behind him, caressing his neck. It could be that Nandor leans imperceptibly closer; it could be a trick of the light. Cecil barely dares to blink.

The two figures in the fire startle and jerk backwards, leaping to their feet and looking frantically behind them. And then a log cracks, sending up a huge shower of sparks. Cecil jumps and nearly falls backwards onto his ass, which would have had disastrous consequences given the whole bathrobe situation.

“Bad luck,” says Lilith from somewhere in the corner, where she’s puttering with something. Cecil has no idea how much time has elapsed. “Keep looking.”

He tries to refocus, blanking his mind. The things that break through, though, are a fair bit less than neutral: the way Guillermo smells and the way Guillermo sounds and the way Guillermo touches him. The giddiness with which he’d bang into Cecil’s apartment after a particularly successful day of vampire hunting. His cunning, smirky-ass smile at the beer garden picnic table with the werewolves. The edge of the divine that, sometimes, despite having no evidence to support it, Cecil feels he’s touched when they’re together.

There are tears pricking at the corners of his eyes, but he forces himself to stare further into the fire through the hot wet blur. Sure enough, the shapes begin to emerge again, although it’s different this time.

The flames seem to fizz as if lashed with rain; a moment later, Cecil watches as wind-battered figures struggle to stand upright in the gale. It’s hard to tell what exactly is going on, but it looks very much like a knock-down, drag-out fight. And he would very much wager that one of those figures is Guillermo. Cecil squints, trying to figure out where they are--and ever-so-helpfully, a familiar shape looms out of the flames.

And then it all vanishes. Cecil wrenches himself away from the fire. He’s breathing as if he’s just run a marathon; his face is blazing, and there’s a horrible wrenching sensation from somewhere in his chest. Lilith is there next to him, murmuring soothing words and pressing a mug of tea into his hands. He takes a tentative sip.

“We can add whiskey later, if that’s what the situation calls for,” she says gently. “Was it bad?”

Cecil takes another sip and sighs into the mug. “Nothing I didn’t know, really.” He squints up at Lilith, phantom lights flaring up around her; turns out staring directly into a fire really fucks up your ability to see anything in a dim room. He lets out a shaky breath. “So all that’s definitely going to happen?”

Lilith shrugs. “Search me. The Sight is a temperamental pain in the ass that may not actually be worth the trouble—and that’s at the best of times.”

“Of freaking course it is.” He rubs his eyes. “What I just saw…am I going to be there for it? Was I looking through my own eyes, just then?”

“What part of ‘temperamental pain in the ass that may not actually be worth the trouble’ wasn’t crystal clear to you, exactly?”

He throws his hands up. “Well, what if I got on a plane to Venezuela tonight and once I’m there I chain myself to a tree and swear not to leave?”

Lilith rolls her eyes. “Don’t be absurd. Besides, I have a theory.”

“…enlighten me.”

“That the things that you can see are small gifts from the universe, designed to take it where it needs to go. The world fixing its own plot holes, if you will.”

“You’re saying that I have The Sight because I need to be in a particular place at a particular time and there’s no mundane way to get me there. Which implies the existence of a divine power, in some way, shape, or form.”

“Not necessarily. The universe is a complex tapestry, and you are but a particularly sassy thread. Maybe. But then I often think that’s all bollocks anyway.”

“Right.” He sighs. “Shit.”

Lilith lets him wallow in the angst for a minute or two, then helps him to his feet. He puts his clothes back on and drinks another mug of whatever that tea was, then then he and Lilith sprawl out on the red velour sofa and watch a few episodes of the _Great British Bake-Off_ and don’t talk about the freaky fire shit, which he probably thinks is for the best. Cecil’s just beginning to feel pleasantly fuzzy in the head (the whiskey has made an encore appearance, which has contributed to the shouting at the TV regarding soggy bottoms) when his phone rings.

“’Lo?” he mumbles into it. His head is in Lilith’s lap; it faintly occurs to him that he may be her new gay best friend.

“Cecil,” says Tanya tersely.

Cecil sits bolt upright. “Yes?”

“Guillermo’s back. Get your ass over here.”

He nearly falls off the couch. _“What?”_

“Demetrius, Kara, and I were at the house shooting b-roll and he just walked up, smooth as that!”

Cecil makes panicked eye contact with Lilith, who gestures frantically for him to put it on speakerphone.

“Did he say anything?”

“Hi, and that it’s been awhile, and he didn’t realize we’re filming again—hang on.” Tanya pulls the phone away from her ear and says something to someone standing next to her. Cecil strains to catch it. “Yeah, it’s Cecil. I figured he’d want to get over here as soon as he heard you’re back, since you two are buddies.”

 _Buddies,_ mouths Lilith, smirking as big as anything. Cecil stares up towards the heavens in despair.

“You want me there now?” he asks, stalling frantically. “I’m all the way in Brooklyn. Do I need to stop for gear, or…?”

“Just get over here!” Tanya practically yells. She hangs up.

“Ugh.” Cecil drops his phone onto the coffee table and buries his face in his hands, suddenly extremely woozy. “I’ve got to go.”

“But we’ve just gotten to the technical challenge! It’s chocolate soufflés!” Lilith pleads, gesturing at the TV.

“Guillermo doesn’t know I’ve been filming the docuseries,” he grits out, hunting for his keys.

Lilith rises to her feet. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

He holds up his hands in a futile attempt to placate her. “I know, I know. In my defense, there was a whole lot of shit he wasn’t telling me either.” He slides his wallet into his back pocket.

“So you’ve been hanging out with his vampire paramour and not telling him. And getting _paid_ for it!” Lilith sounds torn between indignation and deep respect.

“You betcha. We even get dental.” He does the keys-phone-wallet patdown and sighs. “Thanks for everything. I’ve got to go sort this shit out.”

“Take this.” Lilith vaults over the back of the sofa and crosses over the minifridge wedged beneath a very old and expensive-looking side table laden with very esoteric and breakable-looking things.

She rattles around in it—Cecil catches sight of some BabyBels, half a kombucha, and a few rolls of film—and emerges at last with a box.

“Refrigerated?” he asks as she draws near to him, box cradled in her hands.

“A bit perishable.” She pops the lid off and Cecil cranes his neck to see within.

He wrinkles his nose. “That needs to be refrigerated?”

“Hey!” Lilith rejoins, swatting him with her free hand. “It’s sensitive.”

“…the…”

“Amulet.”

“The amulet is sensitive.”

“Correct. C’mere.”

He crosses over to her and ducks his head for her to put it on him. It’s a wrought metal pentacle with a teardrop of cloudy blue glass in the center; the whole shebang hangs on a lanyard that appears to have been pilfered from the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2009 annual meeting. “What does it do?”

“Protection, mostly. A few other little perks here and there.” She straightens it out and steps back to survey him. “Just in case.”

Cecil buries his face in his hands. The amulet feels cool through his t-shirt. “Thanks, Lilith. God knows I’m going to need it.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She opens the door and gently ushers him through. He’s maybe still a little drunk as he descends the spiral staircase and crosses the crypt. Judith smiles knowingly across the counter as Lilith shows Cecil out through the shop. They stand on the stoop for a moment in the bright sunlight, Cecil staring at the flowers in the windowbox because he has no idea what to say.

Lilith, in what can only be described as an act of mercy, clucks and pulls him into a very classy hug/demure-cheek-kiss combo situation. “You’ve made some questionable choices, darling. But I can’t say I blame you.”

He sighs, shielding his eyes against the sun so he can finally look at her. “I know. And I’m about to reap what I sowed.”

She salutes him. “Best of luck.”

He turns on his heel to go, then reconsiders and swivels back. “Actually, while I have you here, Judith said something about me becoming a witch…”

Lilith shrugs. “Sure. I’ll add you to the group chat.”

“Group…” he splutters. Then reconsiders. “You know what? Okay. Fine.” He shimmies his wallet out of his back pocket and then shimmies a business card out of his wallet. (Look, he runs a tight operation in more ways than one).

She takes it and grins. “And as for your little problem…” She purses her lips. “I think you’ll find answers on the solstice.”

He frowns. “What’s the deal with the solstice?” His phone buzzes in his pocket; she inclines her head, indicating that he should check it.

“Oh, wow, that’s the group chat,” he says, scrolling in fascination.

“Looks like you just picked yourself up another conflict of interest, my darling.” 

*

To say that Cecil’s freaking the fuck out would be putting it mildly. One of the perks of being a New Yorker is that you’re pretty much guaranteed to never be the weirdest person in any given public space, but Cecil suspects that he’s pushing his luck on the bus ride over to Staten Island. He might be gently and quietly hyperventilating, just a little bit.

The bus drops him off a few weird, winding blocks away from the house (ah, Staten Island and its occasional middle finger to a sensible street grid). One would think this would give him a slightly hilly walk to compose himself, but really it doesn’t do anything except give him more time and space in which to freak the fuck out. By the time he turns the corner to the house, he’s pretty much fully ready to throw up.

“Hey, Camera Two!” Sean calls from his porch. “Want a beer?”

Cecil waves. “Hi Sean! I’m good, thanks. I’m working,” he explains, pointing at the house.

Sean gives him a big thumbs-up with the hand not holding his own beer. “Did you hear Nandor’s boyfriend came back? About damn time, don’t you think?”

Cecil trips over a loose paving stone.

There are people out front of the house, which means Cecil’s spectacularly awkward approach has a whole-ass audience. There they all are, sitting on the steps: Tanya, Rosario, Kara, and Demetrius, plus Ana with her bike leaned up against the side of the house. (Unclear how she made it over the fucking bridge, which definitely does not allow such methods of conveyance). And Guillermo, sitting there with his back against the door. Smiling, laughing, occasionally gesturing. He’s changed clothes since he and Cecil dozed off in each other’s arms at dawn. Cecil’s heart clenches.

The crew minus Ana look fucking tickled; all the gear is in a pile next to the steps, presumably flung to the side to greet Guillermo. Cecil wonders if there were hugs. There were probably hugs. He sighs and opens the gate with rather more caution than he used to, which is saying something given that he’s entering a yard that, by volume, likely contains more dead bodies than dirt.

“Cecil!” shrieks Tanya, rising to her feet and pointing very unnecessarily at Cecil gingerly making his way across the lawn. “He’s back! Look!”

“I see that,” says Cecil, trying to laugh in a non-manic way as he mounts the steps. Ana slowly stands up and moves to stand behind everyone, looking at Cecil with very wide eyes. There’s general exclamations and gestures and the sort of flat-out batshit crazy that he’s come to love in his coworkers, but Cecil can barely hear it over the pounding of his own heart. He’d taken the amulet off on the bus and slid it into his back pocket, which unfortunately means he now keeps touching his own ass for reassurance.

Finally, it’s inevitable. Cecil meets Guillermo’s eyes. He can’t quite figure out what it is he sees there; mostly, it seems that Guillermo is sizing him up.

“It’s great to see you again, Guillermo.” Never mind that Cecil’s got several sex-related bruises in various stages of healing, plus what he suspects is a wicked love bite in the meat of his shoulder.

Guillermo smiles and inclines his head. “It’s great to see you too, Cecil. How’s life been?”

“Oh, you know. I take on a lot of random projects in the summers, so…uh…Mitzvahs. It’s been an unending stream of mitzvahs. With an occasional wedding thrown in for good measure. Which...you know...chocolate fountains. So. Can’t complain, really.”

“Oh, wow. Great,” says Guillermo. Cecil hopes he’s the only one that’s aware what a horrifically terrible actor Guillermo is.

“Oh, Guillermo!” says Rosario, turning to him with the laser focus Cecil knows from experience means trouble. “Cecil’s sleeping with someone new and he won’t tell us who. Do you think you can pry it out of him for us?”

Cecil and Ana’s eyes meet very, very briefly, and then as one they look over to Guillermo in a small panic.

Guillermo chuckles. “I think you overestimate my ability to make Cecil do anything he doesn’t want to.” _Smooth fucking bastard_ , Cecil thinks, but he breathes an internal sigh of relief anyway.

“We were just telling Guillermo that he came at the perfect time,” Rosario butts in, turning back to Cecil. “Apparently there’s a solstice party tomorrow.”

“A what now?” asks Cecil, furrowing his brow. It takes everything he has not to reach back and touch his own ass again.

“Yeah, it’s apparently a big blowout type deal,” adds Demetrius, miming an explosion with his hands. “Like the orgy, but it’s called something else and has some vague pagan shit involved.”

“Oh! That’s…interesting.” Cecil looks at Tanya and Rosario. “I take it that it’s all hands on deck for that one?”

“You betcha,” says Tanya dourly. Cecil suspects that she saw some things that permanently scarred her at the last orgy, though she refuses to talk about it.

“Dude, let’s do an interview before the vampires wake up!” Tanya swats Guillermo excitedly. “I won’t ask you anything scandalous, I promise.”

Guillermo giggles a little. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

“It has to be with the second unit,” says Rosario, standing up and brushing off the back of her pants. (It’s a reflex when you work around this house. God knows what lurks on the surfaces.) “Demetrius and Kara have to go on lunch. Actually at lunchtime, for once.”

“Will wonders never cease,” murmurs Ana, not looking away from Cecil as they all pile in the front door. The house is silent as a crypt (which, technically, Cecil supposes it is). “Fancy room?” asks Tanya, jerking her head in its direction.

“Yeah, sure,” says Guillermo. “Hang on one sec; I’ve got to get something from the attic. Cecil, could you help me?”

Ana coughs discreetly. Guillermo looks over at her. “Okay, Ana too.”

The three of them ascend the rickety stairs in painful, painful silence.

“In my defense,” Cecil begins as they climb the last few stairs, but Ana shushes him aggressively.

“You’re a lot less stealthy than you think you are, dude,” she mutters, swatting him on the backside as they emerge into the attic. Guillermo’s already rifling around in a box.

“What are we bringing down?” asks Cecil, looking around in confusion.

Ana rolls her eyes. “That was clearly an excuse, dumbass.” She turns to face Guillermo. “Look, I’m putting the blame for this particular pickle squarely on Cecil. I have no shame. However, a not-so-small part of me wants him to be happy, and he seems happy with you. I’ll cover for you two numbnuts for as long as I can, but you should be aware that I might be putting my career at stake, the tiniest bit. For what it’s worth.”

Cecil coughs a little bit. Guillermo also coughs a little bit and seems to feel the urgent need to put his entire head inside the box.

“…you _broke up_?” Ana surmises in half a shriek, leaning on an extremely naked (and terrible) statue as if she’s going to swoon.

“Look, let’s just go back downstairs—” Guillermo half-begs.

Ana bashes her forehead gently but firmly against the statue’s abs. “So all the subterfuge was for nothing?”

“Let’s not talk about it, please,” murmurs Cecil. “It’s…stuff happened. It’s fine. We’re fine. I mean, I don’t actually know what’s going on, but we’re fine. I think. At least there’s not really a conflict of interest anymore.” He looks helplessly at Guillermo, who looks back equally helplessly. “Although, while I have you both here—” he pauses, unsure how exactly to drop their particular bomb. “The glowing thing?”

Ana eyes him. “I’m listening…”

“Apparently I’m not supposed to be able to see that.”

“According to…”

“Don’t worry about it.” Among other things, Cecil had promised to wait for Guillermo before he started another season of _Bake Off_ and he doesn’t fancy the consequences of reneging on that one. “The important part is that apparently mundane losers like me shouldn’t be able to see their magically-inclined lovers lighting up like the Fourth of July.”

“So what does that mean?” asks Ana.

Cecil shrugs. “That I’ve got the ability to see things other people can’t, apparently. The Sight, or the Second Sight, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Helpful skill in a camera operator,” Ana remarks. “Of course, it might be a chicken-or-egg scenario—did you become handy with the photographic arts because you’ve got a second sight, or did you pick up a second sight because you’re handy in the photographic arts? You’ve been awfully quiet, Guillermo.”

“Just…pondering.” Guillermo’s doing that thing where he’s so lost in thought his lips part a little and he looks unfairly good doing it. Cecil wonders how hard he’d have to bash his own head against the Stairmaster to delete that memory for the good of his own sanity.

“Care to ponder aloud?” asks Ana.

“They’ll be looking for us downstairs,” says Guillermo abruptly. He casts around and picks up a random set of maracas with penises on them. “We need to get all our ducks in a row before the vampires wake up.”

“‘Not going back to Nandor,’ huh?” asks Cecil with more than a touch of acerbity.

Guillermo rolls his eyes. “Cecil, I say this with great respect: this is stuff beyond your ken. Your weird-ass saintly-glow-seeing ken, but the point still stands.”

“Still looks a lot like going back to Nandor from where I’m standing,” Cecil mutters dourly.

Ana squares them both up. “Cecil, you know betting pool conflicts have to be settled by a quorum of—”

“Betting pool?” squawks Guillermo.

Cecil and Ana make eye contact and, as one, decide that the most mature thing to do is skedaddle.

*

Back downstairs and only breathing a little heavily, they set up the shot lighting, drag out a chair for Guillermo, and start rolling. It’s very civilized, all things considered.

“Where have you been all summer, Guillermo?” Rosario asks, cutting right to the chase. She’s scribbling furiously on her clipboard.

Guillermo smiles secretively. “Unfortunately, that’s classified.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Also classified.”

Ana winks at Cecil and, in a horrible moment of clarity, he realizes that from now she’s definitely going to be referring to him as _Classified._ He’s already having visions of her changing his name in her phone.

Rosario snorts. “Of course it is. All right. So if you can’t tell us what you’ve been up to all summer, can you tell us why you came back?”

Guillermo shrugs. “The time felt right.”

“Just…felt?”

“I finished a few things that I needed to do, and realized some things about myself. That’s all. I’m afraid there’s not some big, grand reason. Just an instinct that things were changing.”

Cecil barely holds back a whimper.

“Okaaaaay.” Rosario scribbles more. “Can you tell us what happened at the Théâtre des Vampires? Well, your take at least.”

Guillermo sighs and squares his shoulders up. “I realized that the Théâtre des Vampires was a trap designed to murder Laszlo, Nadja, Nandor and Colin Robinson for the vampicides I’d committed. I had an obligation to go after them and save them, even if it meant sacrificing myself, because I was technically the guilty one. I found the theatre and went inside. You all filmed that. But then, after I told you to stay outside, I climbed the fire escape onto the roof. I found my way in through the ducts and ended up in the rigging above the stage, which is where Cecil and Ana picked up on me.”

 _He mic’d himself up,_ Ana mouths to Rosario. Rosario nods and scribbles furiously; Cecil catches the word _Rick._

“And then?”

“I slaughtered the vampires in the theater. Well, most of them. Some got away.”

“Cecil and Ana were in there with you.”

“Yeah.” Guillermo looks down at his hands. “Cecil got knocked out at one point, but Ana actually jiu jitsued about six different vampires. It was really helpful.”

He knows it’s all a toxic social construct anyway, but Cecil’s sense of masculinity still curls up and dies a little at that one.

*

Interview concluded, they all sit in the fancy room awaiting sunset. It is supremely, supremely awkward. As the light fades, Guillermo seems to twitch a little in the direction of upstairs, then remembers himself.

“Not a familiar anymore, I suppose,” observes Ana, popping the tab on a soda. (They all made a run to the Stop & Shop in anticipation of this very awkwardness).

Guillermo shakes his head, sparing a glance towards the actual familiars, who are perched on the piano bench looking very much at a loss. The two of them have made no secret of the fact that Nandor had spent the last four months moping his ass off regarding Guillermo’s disappearance. They’ve also made no secret of the fact that they’re super into the occult and it makes the vampires mildly afraid of them, which Cecil thinks is probably pretty healthy.

“Um,” says Guillermo, and stops. Cecil has the awful, dawning realization that he’s watching the man with whom he is still very much besotted decide whether he wants to be present when the man that the available evidence suggests he _actually_ loves awakens. It’s not a great feeling, for the record.

“I’m gonna…go upstairs,” says Guillermo softly to camera. To Cecil. To camera. It’s unclear where one ends and the other begins, honestly. “You guys should stay down here.”

“Right. Great. Cool.” Cecil is most definitely babbling. “Very reasonable, yeah. Eminently groovy. Awesome.” Tanya stares at him; Cecil strongly suspects she’s going to forcibly drug test him the second they get back to the office.

*

It comes to pass that, as much as has changed (and nailed Cecil directly in the solar plexus with a baseball bat in the process), not much is all that different. At length, Guillermo returns downstairs with Nandor, who looks absolutely dazed with happiness, if slightly confused. The familiars retrieve Nadja and Laszlo, who keep looking at Guillermo as if he’s going to stake them at every second and consequently refuse to turn their backs on him. If only to cut the awkward, they start rolling on interviews.

“You’re just in time for the party!” Laszlo proclaims the second the clapper falls.

“What party’s that?” asks Rosario, humoring him.

Laszlo scoffs. “Only the most fashionable event in the supernatural calendar! Well, the second-most, after the Théâtre des Vampires. Actually, no, the third, after the Théâtre des Vampires _and_ the Biannual Vampire Orgy.” He stops to count on his fingers. “Wait—the fourth. Théâtre des Vampires, Biannual Vampire Orgy, then the Full Moon Floating Luau & Poker Night. But rest assured that the solstice party is very exciting and very fashionable, as evidenced by the fact that Giz— _Guillermo_ has rematerialized to celebrate it with us. And you’re in luck! It’s tomorrow night.”

“What happens at this party?”

“Well, as you may or may not be aware, the summer solstice is the shortest night of the year. After, the days get shorter and the nights get longer, which is very important to those of us who get fried to a crisp by sunlight. It’s also a night that’s very tied into some older pagan shit, which I know fuck-all about but do think is very sexy.”

Nadja nods in agreement. “Yes. Paganism is very interesting to us as vampires, since Christians hate us but obviously our nature extends far beyond the mundane into…well, something else. I’ve never really been clear on that relationship, though my ghost keeps scolding me about looking it up on a computing machine.”

“Nandor? Anything to add?” prods Rosario.

Nandor startles in his chair, which is not a subtle motion when you’re six feet tall and wearing six million very expensive layers plus fuck-you boots. “Yes, yes. It’s very, um, glamorous.” He can’t seem to take his eyes off Guillermo, who is standing directly behind Cecil in what Cecil can only assume is a power move. “Very pagan.” Cecil, forgetting himself, presses a hand to his back pocket.

“However,” drones Colin Robinson from behind them, causing everyone to jump and groan in unison, “There’s a major storm rolling in. First hurricane of the year, in fact. It was going to make landfall in the Carolinas and miss us entirely, but apparently meteorological predictions are only so accurate--” Cecil’s heart just about stops, flashing back to the thrashing rain he saw while kneeling on Lilith’s floor. “Supposed to totally wallop all five boroughs. Flooding, power outages, the works. It was supposed to fizzle out when it made landfall, but somehow it gathered steam instead and is heading straight at us. You can blame climate change for that one. Did you know that the modern North American hurricane-naming system originated--”

“So if you’ll excuse us,” Laszlo butts in grandly, “We have a party to prepare for.”

“And sandbags to put down,” mumbles Guillermo darkly.

*

In spite of having previously sworn off the practice for the rest of his natural life, several hours later Cecil finds himself once again crouched on the roof of a pit toilet with a camera. He’s not happy about it, per se, but at least this one appears to be a damn sight more structurally sound than the last one. He’s also made Ana sit next to the chimney, for what it’s worth.

Party-preparation-wise, they’d anticipated a semi-mellow night of creepy-paper hanging and mid-range sniping, but one thing led to another and suddenly Cecil and Ana are perched on top of the aforementioned godforsaken pit toilet in Fresh Kills waiting for Nadja to rendezvous with an individual of unknown nature for items of an also-unknown nature. (Confirmed: Fresh Kills is Nandor’s clandestine-meeting location of choice purely because the name sounds cool. Cecil has interview footage to prove it). Demetrius and Kara are off on the other end of the park tailing Nandor, who apparently has a meeting with a bunch of faeries. The last time Cecil saw these particular faeries they were attempting to punch Nandor’s lights out, but apparently that’s all water under the bridge now. 

“How are you feeling?” Ana asks tentatively. It’s been an hour and all they’ve done so far is swatted ballsy squirrels away from the snacks in Ana’s audio bag and avoided talking about Cecil’s feelings.

“Like someone drop-kicked my heart into the East River,” says Cecil morosely, shredding a piece of dried mango instead of actually eating it. “I know I deserve it.”

Ana considers. “I don’t know if you do, really. I’ve sort of lost the plot of who’s using who in what manner and to what degree. Guillermo used you to lose his virginity, then kept using you because apparently you tapped that with great skill and maybe he also caught feelings. You used Guillermo because he came to you in a moment of need and you caved to your giant case of hearteyes. Nandor tried to connect with Guillermo, also presumably on account of feelings, but then you intercepted…Shit, we need a spreadsheet for this one too.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Cecil warns. “I’ve had enough of that shit to last a lifetime.” He peers out through the leaves. Nadja is still pacing, alone in the lamplight.

“We need to talk.” Guillermo is suddenly very, very close to him.

Cecil yelps and nearly falls off the roof. Guillermo reaches out to catch him and there’s a horrible and awful but kind-of sexy moment where Cecil’s in Guillermo’s arms in the moonlight and staring into his eyes and Ana’s making no effort to hide her snorts of disdain.

“Are you going to the solstice party?” asks Guillermo quietly, chucking Cecil’s uneaten dried mango at Ana’s head without looking.

“Yeah, why?” Cecil whispers back, still swooning, because he’s macho and cool like that.

“No reason,” says Guillermo softly, depositing Cecil back onto his own ass.

“Care to tell us why you’re tailing Nadja?” asks Ana, throwing the mango at Guillermo. 

“Tell me about this betting pool of yours.”

“Tell us why you’re tailing Nadja.”

Guillermo considers. “Would you believe me if I told you I’m not tailing Nadja?”

“Would you believe me if I told you there’s no betting pool?”

“Touché.”

They all stare at each other. Cecil is mostly focused on not crying, so he leaves the hardcore glaring to Ana.

“What’s going to happen at the solstice party, Guillermo?” asks Ana levelly. Guillermo shushes her, pointing out through the trees. Cecil swears quietly and hauls the camera up to start rolling.

The figure that’s arrived in Nadja’s pool of lamplight is wearing an honest-to-god fuck-you hooded robe and appears to be actually gliding.

“It’s very kind of you to meet me here,” says Nadja. Cecil doesn’t think he’s ever heard her voice shake like that before. The figure inclines their head and from within the folds of their robe draws out a gift bag. It’s pink and sparkly and festooned with a pug in a birthday hat. Nadja takes it almost reverently; it seems fairly heavy for the size. Beside Cecil, Guillermo feels like he’s forgotten how to breathe.

“Thank you. It is an honor,” Nadja says, full-on bowing. The figure turns and withdraws into the trees.

Cecil and Ana stare openmouthed for a moment before turning to look at Guillermo.

“Care to enlighten us?” Cecil asks.

Guillermo shakes his head and disappears into the canopy.


	4. Chapter 4

The day of the solstice dawns hot and humid and tinged with regret. (Or maybe that’s just Cecil). Cecil has a fitful afternoon nap whose restlessness is compounded by the fact that the crew members with long commutes have taken him up on his stupid, stupid offer to crash at his place rather than go all the way home for the day. Rosario, Demetrius, and McKenzie the intern all knock out in the bed (Cecil tries really hard not to think about what they would do if they knew about all the things that had gone on in that bed) and Rick the editor passes out in the recliner. Given how horribly the last major vampiric social event went for everyone involved, Rick has volunteered to stay at the office as a command center--sort of like their own personal Q, minus the exploding pens and plus a bunch of Labrador Retrievers.

Cecil’s been lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling for an hour when Ana lets herself in and starts raiding the fridge. Cecil doesn’t have a prayer of falling back asleep anyway, so he gets up to join her and quietly let her in on what went down at Witch HQ. He’s read enough fantasy books to know that it’s stupid to leave your right-hand person out of this shit. To Ana’s credit, she takes it all more or less in stride.

“Are the visions accurate, though?” she whispers.

Cecil shrugs. “Lilith wouldn’t tell me.” He steals a forkful of enchilada off of Ana’s plate while she’s distracted by holding the amulet up to the light. “She basically said that The Sight is a stupid gift to have because it’s so imprecise and random.” 

“Then what’s the point? The whole reason that the Sight is useful is that you have a head start on whatever’s going to happen. Why else would they hand out that info willy-nilly to mere mortals?”

Cecil buries his face in his hands. “I don’t want to look under that particular rock.”

“So we’re getting at that God shit again. The same stuff that was tormenting Guillermo.”

He sighs. “Whatever’s going on, it’s kicking off tonight. And Guillermo doesn’t want to tell us what it is but won’t outright forbid us from being there—which means that either he doesn’t think we’re in danger or he’s well and truly turned into a psychopath.”

There’s a tap at the window. Cecil jumps about six feet in the air. Ana swears and nearly drops the amulet in her enchiladas.

“Why does everyone think my fire escape is New York’s hottest club?” Cecil hisses as he leans across the arm of the sofa and hauls open the window.

Ange the Werewolf grins from among Cecil’s tomato plants. “This club has everything!” she says in her best Stefon voice. “Star-crossed lovers! Vampire slayings! Some seriously good cooking and cleanliness standards for a dude in his twenties.”

Ana joins him at the window, still holding her enchiladas. “She’s got a point about the cooking.” She passes the plate out through the window to a very grateful Ange.

“Listen,” says Arj, who Cecil can’t stop mentally referring to as ‘Lead Werewolf’ in spite of all the Dungeons and Dragons they’ve played. “Something’s going to happen tonight.” He inspects the jalapeño plant with interest but seems to decide he’s better off not shoving one in his mouth. Cecil casts a nervous glance to Rick gently snoring under an afghan.

“We figured as much. Guillermo’s being squirelly,” Ana murmurs, taking the now-empty plate back from Ange. “You don’t know what it is?”

“He’s being squirrelly with us too. Well, squirellier than usual, and usual is pretty damn squirelly to begin with,” says Ange.

The four of them look helplessly at each other.

“Watch each other’s back?” Ana says finally.

“Only thing we can do, really,” Arj agrees.

Ana hands over Rick’s cell number with the hope that he won’t mind also playing Q for a gaggle of werewolves. They all shake on it and the werewolves rattle back down the fire escape.

*

That evening, quelle surprise, finds them heading over the fucking bridge in the golden hour, the light playing across the interior of the van. Cecil tries to focus on the way that the beams flit pleasantly across his coworkers faces, because the alternative is probably throwing up.

“I don’t know if there’s actually going to be anyone at this party,” Rosario cautions as Ana nearly takes out an entire herd of traffic cones on the offramp. “They’re vampire pariahs—vampariahs, oh hey, that’s funny…” She pauses for a moment to humbly accent fist bumps—“And after all this time we don’t know much about whatever other things go bump in the night around here.”

The sheer number of cars parked all over the yard (and sinking gently into the lawn at odd angles thanks to all the decomposing bodies) belies that assumption. Their usual parking spot is taken by the most beat-up Camry Cecil has ever seen, which has to be some kind of unprecedented world record given that every Camry in the world is thrown into a slimy river full of knives and ghosts and then dredged up a year later as a rite of passage.

“Press passes?” Ana asks incredulously as Laszlo meets them in front of Sean’s house, where Ana has done an incredibly sketchy street-parking job.

“Well, I got the idea from that lovely production of the vampire thee-a-tur,” Laszlo pronounces, draping mismatched lanyards around all their necks.

“You mean the one where you were almost decapitated because you were wrongly accused of mass vampicide?” Tanya asks in confusion.

Laszlo inclines his head graciously. “The very same, m’lady.”

Tanya, who spent her childhood training as an elite gymnast in the former USSR, does not truck with such shit. She rolls her eyes at Laszlo as she snatches her pass before he can try to put it on her. Cecil wonders idly if between the two of them Ana and Tanya could protect him from the wrath of Nandor’s head-ripping gloves. Probably not, but he can dream.

“I will warn you, friends,” proclaims Laszlo as they lock the van. “That these ordeals tend to be quick and thorough, seeing as we are operating on the shortest night of the year and it takes quite a while for everyone to return to Man-a-hatta and other parts unknown. So really, it’s just a speedy hump and dump, but supernatural-style, so extra-kinky and kind of weird.” He winks and summons them to follow him down the sidewalk.

The house is decorated like the extremely drunk lovechild of a tiki bar and a carnival—and is full to the seams. Apparently, the takedown of the biggest, snootiest assholes in the vampire community has made Laszlo, Nadja, and Nandor local celebrities in the eyes of a large swath of the tristate area’s non-vampire supernatural beings. There are faeries and ghosts and werewolves and all sorts of things Cecil doesn’t recognize and quite frankly does not care to. In the guise of being Extremely Professional and On the Job, he presses the camera to his eye and jerks his head for Ana to follow him. She rolls her eyes but acquiesces.

“Are you rolling?” she asks quietly.

“Not yet,” he hisses back. “Demetrius was, though, and he was in front of me.”

“Okay, I’m going to say one thing before we start recording. You seriously need to get your poop in a group on this whole conflict of interest business. You can’t just keep scampering around like a cat who’s had his tail stepped on once and is now terrified of all feet. There are too many feet in the world for that, Cecil.”

Cecil rolls his non-camera eye at her. “I’m going to start filming now. You’ll follow me?”

Ana huffs. “Fine. But I swear, if you stumble into some of the freakier sex stuff, so help me God…”

He starts rolling. He and Ana wave goodbye to Rosario, who has been held up by Nadja in the entryway for a particularly graphic-looking explanation of sex toys that Cecil can’t for the life of him identify. The phrase ‘penis blender’ is most definitely their cue to leave, though.

There’s a weird sloshing coming from within the fancy room. Cecil hip-checks the door open carefully and comes face-to-face with Sherman the Goddamn Merman, floating in an honest-to-god dunk tank.

And he’s not alone.

Arj the Werewolf picks his head up from whatever it was doing at the water line beneath the seat, flips it so that his hair does that cool mermaid splash thing, and winks at Cecil. “Care to join, friend?”

“Sorry, can’t, I’m working,” stammers Cecil, jerking his shoulder with the camera on it.

“Want to say anything for the camera?” Ana asks, because apparently she hates Cecil and wants him to die messily of secondhand embarrassment.

“Not really, homeskillet,” shrugs Ange, surfacing as well. “I’m starting to get pruney, though.” She does nod seriously at the two of them, though. Cecil’s not sure how much back-watching Arj and Ange are capable of doing while having an underwater threesome, but he’s willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

“All right, then let’s wrap this up, brosephs!” rejoins Sherman the Merman. “My balls are even bluer than usual here!” Cecil and Ana trot off without bothering to actually scramble for some closure. There were definitely genitalia in that shot anyway.

They press deeper into the house. It’s basically a standard high school prom, but with better outfits, more gore, and a lot of swords. A bunch of witches are laughing about something under a portrait of Laszlo gentleman-hunting an alligator; Sean the neighbor has somehow wiggled his way in and is nodding vaguely at what Cecil is pretty sure is a succubus, his eyes glazed over and his trousers very visibly tented. Some faeries are playing Uno and eating pretzels literally two feet away, apparently unconcerned.

“This footage is all going to be totally unusable,” Cecil mumbles to Ana. “I know Rick loves blurring out inhuman genitals, but this is probably too much even for him.” Ana shrugs.

“Kool Aid?” asks a passing warlock, offering them a tray full of paper cups.

“Historically speaking, I feel like that’s a bad idea,” frowns Ana.

“Thanks, we’re working,” apologizes Cecil, steering Ana away.

They snag a few quick interviews with random partygoers, which though hilarious and disturbing, don’t shed any light on why Guillermo was being so squirelly about the evening’s festivities.

“I mean, I get that there’s some kind of truce going on,” whispers Cecil when he and Ana take a moment to lock themselves in the bathroom and compose themselves. “The werewolves wouldn’t be here otherwise. But…”

“Maybe it really is just a fun evening of kum-ba-yah, and Guillermo’s just embarrassed because he doesn’t want you to see him leading campfire songs.”

“Yep, that’s totally it. And that mysterious package Nadja got in the park last night was just fun-shaped marshmallows.”

Ana rolls her eyes and shoves him out of the bathroom, but she looks as worried as Cecil’s ever witnessed her.

“Have you seen Nandor or Guillermo?” she finally asks once they finish up interviewing a Bababook about his love for Bernie Sanders.

Cecil shakes his head. “Not at all.”

“Any of your magic peering-into-the-future powers coming in handy?” The mic’s still probably picking her up, but hopefully Rick will do them a solid and look the other way.

“Nope.”

They embark upon another round of the house. There’s another mermaid flicking her tail happily in the upstairs bathroom while Nadja serenades her on the lute; Laszlo has somehow worked his way around the entire house and lapped them, drawing up alongside them wearing significantly fewer clothes than he was in the first place. Cecil tries really hard not to stare at the coconut bra.

“Ready for the ritual?” Laszlo asks grandly, looking very nearly like a Labrador who’s just sighted a dead duck floating in the river. Maybe. Cecil, a city kid through and through, has always struggled to keep his pastoral metaphors straight.

“What ritual?” he asks, utterly stymied. Laszlo grins and crooks a pervy finger in their direction. (never mind how Cecil knows it’s pervy, it just is). They follow, with no shortage of trepidation. As they enter the foyer, Nadja materializes behind them seemingly out of nowhere, still lugging the lute. The stairs are dimly lit only by the usual lamps; Cecil trips over the same damn step he always does, mentally apologizing to Rick in advance for the sheer volume of weird porn he’s about to have to sift through.

There’s a strange glow emanating from under the door of Nadja and Laszlo’s crypt. They barge through the door without knocking first, which is a really fucking brave move in light of all the sex that happens everywhere in this house. Cecil’s brain has mercifully thrown in the towel on the fear responses and he’s just on autopilot now, rolling as if nothing’s amiss.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ and all of his carpenter friends,” is the first thing Ana says, which naturally causes a solid 70% of those present to recoil and hiss.

“Sorry, sorry,” she sighs, waving her hands around abstractly as if that will help matters. “But…seriously? Guys?”

Nandor points directly at Cecil with a lot of authority for someone who’s currently pacing around the edge of a salt circle completely shirtless. “ _Again_ with the gate-crashing shit!”

Cecil decides that’s as good a cue as any to turn and point directly at Guillermo, who’s currently constituting the other half of Staten Island’s premier salt-circle-pacing team. “Care to enlighten us?”

“What the fuck is going on?” breathes Ana quietly. 

“Yo,” says Wallace the Necromancer.

“Sup,” says Vladislav. He’s swapped out the red velvet cloak he was wearing at the Théâtre des Vampires for a look that Cecil can only describe as ‘sparkly bondage wizard.’

“Hello, fellow spirits of mother Earth,” says one of the new vaguely-Wiccan Staten Island familiars.

“This seems...strategically complex,” says Cecil.

“A weird-ass gamble. And that’s the generous read,” supplies Ana, looking sideways at Guillermo. “What are we hoping to accomplish here, exactly?”

Cecil has a horrible, dawning suspicion that whatever’s going down here is directly linked to that night that Guillermo won’t talk about--the one where he showed up at Cecil’s doorstep covered in blood and with a far more intense interest in BDSM than any he’d displayed to date. And then he realizes that he can’t see the door anymore behind the press of bodies and he wonders how long he and Ana will have to be missing before Ange and Arj start sacking the place--provided they’re planning on emerging from Sherman’s dunk tank anytime soon. Their absence can’t be a coincidence; Cecil strongly suspects Guillermo’s left them out because they wouldn’t approve. He looks over at Laszlo, but Laszlo’s uncharacteristically poker-faced.

“The bacchanal is in full swing, I take it?” Vladislav asks Laszlo.

“Quite,” says Laszlo. “Thrumming away. Even I was a little grossed out by some of the things I saw.”

“You brought the camera crew, you attention whore,” notes Vladislav idly. Then he gets a closer look at the two of them in spite of their best attempts to hide behind their gear. (In all fairness, it usually works. No one ever notices that the camera guy is an actual human person). “The same ones, as fate would have it.” He points at Ana. “That’s handy. Watch that one, she’s very good at kicking people in the balls.”

Ana grins a little bit. No one’s completely immune to flattery.

Cecil clears his throat. “Would someone like to explain what’s going on? For the, um, documentary.” He sort of wiggles his camera shoulder as if that’ll sell it. (To be fair, it usually does). “Guillermo? Nandor?”

“The ritual demands that I make a sacrifice to the gods and the ancestors,” says Guillermo slowly, not looking at Cecil.

Cecil decides to play along in the hopes that this episode of sudden-onset batshit-crazy will start to make more sense. “What did you say you’d give them in exchange?”  
“Something important to me. It was...unspecified what it would be.” He looks nervously at Vladislav, who grins at Cecil.

Cecil realizes that he knows exactly what it’s going to be. And Guillermo realizes it too, and promptly says a whole lot of words that Cecil had never heard him say in succession. Guillermo makes a wild lunge for Vlad but is seized by vampiric hangers-on and flung back towards Nandor.

“How’d they find out?” Cecil hisses to Ana.

“Wait, wait, wait!” says Nandor frantically, waving his hands around. “This is _not_ what we agreed on! This is wildly outside the parameters of the truce that we all signed.” He points to the side table, where the sparkly gift bag from last night is twinkling ominously in the candlelight. Cecil really hoped someone had to go to Kinkos in the middle of the night to print off and binder-punch whatever weird-ass agreement made this little soiree possible. “We called a truce between you hunting us down and Guillermo hunting you down so we could--”

“Bonus points for SAT words,” interrupts Vladislav smoothly as unseen hands divest Cecil of the camera. Cecil feels oddly naked without it. “But humans have always been collateral damage, insignificant enough to not even get a mention in our agreements. And anyway, since when are you so attached to humans, Nandor?”

Nandor does a very good impression of a goldfish. An extremely hairy goldfish, granted. Vladislav, meanwhile, grabs Cecil by the scruff of his neck with that freakish vampire strength that Cecil has come to know and love. Cecil is starting to understand, as Vladislav pushes him rather unceremoniously towards the salt circle, what Lilith meant by second sight being more of a pain in the ass than anything. All he’s running with are a few seconds of crappy fire-filled footage of Guillermo and Nandor about to engage in some literal necking, which doesn’t exactly narrow things down. Or help Cecil out in the feelings department, but that’s neither here nor there. 

“What are we summoning, exactly?” he asks, trying to buy time. “And isn’t the sacrifice traditionally a goat?”

Vladislav shrugs and casually shoves Cecil to his knees, directly across the circle from where Nandor is doing the same to Guillermo (but a damn sight more gently, and with wild panic in his eyes). “It’s harder to get a goat then you’d think. We’d have had to drive to Vineland, and I hate that shit. Plus you’re more potent, anyway.”

 _The universe filling its plot holes,_ Cecil thinks desperately as Wallace steps up to the edge of the circle. The bacchanal downstairs must be the fuel source for whatever horseshit is about to go down, which apparently involves sacrificing . But why did Cecil have a warning, if he’s just going to be fed to whatever’s going to come oozing out of the center of the salt circle?

 _Answers,_ he thinks as Nandor gets to his knees behind Guillermo, the hazy scene Cecil saw in Lilith’s fireplace resolving into reality before his eyes. Nandor’s eyes are wild with fear. Good to know that the guy feels at least slightly horrified at the idea of sacrificing Cecil. Or maybe it’s just the idea that he got played. _They want answers._ If Cecil survives this shit, he’s going to need to do some serious unpacking.

“You’re not summoning God, are you?” Cecil asks skeptically.

Vlad’s hand goes unnaturally still on the scruff of Cecil’s neck.

“Holy _shit._ I was kind of joking…” he trails off.

“Well, fuck me,” marvels Ana from somewhere in a scrum of captors. “Trying to solve the all-consuming human question by throwing my camera guy into a salt circle. That’s a new level of stupid, even for you guys.” She’s starting to get her balls-kicking face into place. 

Instead of dignifying that with a response, Wallace steps forward and raises his arms over the salt circle.

The house shakes.

“Easy, mate!” rejoins Laszlo, grabbing a candelabra for support.

“Wasn’t me,” protests Wallace, dropping his arms and looking around.

“Hurricane,” supplies a hanger-on helpfully, looking up from her phone. “Just made landfall at the Jersey shore. Apparently half of Wildwood’s toast.”

“If you’d be so kind,” says Vlad to Nandor, handing him a bright pink Hydroflask of the sort usually seen in the backpacks of 17-year-old girls. Judging by the stickers on it, it may have in fact been purloined from a local teenager. Cecil’s amused to see one that says _Love is Love._ “Your blood and his, and be lively about it. Don’t want to do this shit in the dark, thanks.” Nandor makes no move to take the Hydroflask, so Vlad just sort of chucks at it his head, forcing Nandor to choose between snatching it out of midair and taking a stainless steel water bottle to the face. Nandor, understandably, chooses to catch it.

Nandor drops to his knees behind Guillermo. It feels very, very weird inside Cecil’s brain right now. He’s not entirely sure on what plane of time and space he’s existing on right now, but it’s definitely not the regular one. It’s too wobbly, for a start, almost as if he’s underwater, and there’s also the minor fact that Guillermo’s gone back to glowing again. Nandor’s moving unnaturally slowly, curling his fingers around the Hydroflask and reaching for Guillermo’s neck. Wallace steps up to the circle and starts scatting very badly, which unfortunately comes through to Cecil loud and clear. The temperature in the room drops by about thirty degrees and everyone currently not being held against their will flattens themselves against the walls. A burst of light rockets forth from the circle. 

Cecil has seen Indiana Jones and is well aware of the head-melting perils of staring directly into the face of divinity. But in the moment, he can’t look away. He stares as if compelled into the circle, into the writhing morass of...

Well, in hindsight Cecil’s not so sure. He knows he saw something, as did Guillermo and Nandor. But dammit, he can’t for the life of him remember what it was, and he suspects that’s ultimately for the best. He likes his head unexploded, thanks.

“Oh, _fuck,”_ says Nandor, very calmly.

“Yeah,” Guillermo echoes faintly. Wallace’s scatting increases in volume, intensity, and spit production.

“Accept our sacrifice, O Great One!” yells one of the familiars. “So that we may look upon you!”

As the interior of the circle starts roaring in earnest, Vlad gives Cecil a push.

And then another one.

And one more.

“Um, you’re supposed to go in,” Vladislav protests, bemused.

“Yeah, no, I got that part,” Cecil says slowly. He’s still on his knees, with Vladislav grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, and it’s starting to get actively uncomfortable. 

“Weird,” muses Vladislav, looking helplessly over at Wallace, who is still scatting away. Cecil really needs to send Lilith a fruit basket. Or maybe just alcohol and a _Bake Off_ box set.

And that’s the moment that Cecil’s favorite werewolf pack chooses to come crashing through the ceiling. It’s not a bad one, all things considered. Cecil feels, quite frankly, blessed--for all of about two seconds, before he has to turn his attention to the massive throwdown unfolding, because the ceiling has also disgorged a number of very angry vampire assassins and Things are Very Suddenly Happening.

“Cecil!” yells Ana, evidently having managed to kick some balls, and he realizes he’s just standing there dumbly.

He plunges into the fray after her.

Things get a bit blurry after that. The rest of the ceiling comes crashing down, sending Sherman the Oddly Woke North Jersey Merman thundering down onto the floorboards like an enormous, angry fish flopping around on a dock. He’s got an honest-to-god trident in his hands, though it does have strobe lights and a speaker blasting what might be Sean Paul. At one point, Cecil swears to God that Nandor and Ana are standing back-to-back fighting off Vlad and his entourage like in some sort of spy movie (and fuck it, it does look cool).

In due course the fight bursts out the doors of the crypt; Cecil has no idea how, but somehow everyone’s gotten sucked in. Maybe it’s whatever’s still brewing away in the middle of the circle; maybe it’s the solstice; maybe everyone was just really pent up. Either way, he slides down the bannister (for the record it, looks very cool) and starts casting around for something to weaponize that’s not a $10,000 camera.

“Mother _fucker!_ ” Ana shrieks from the doorway of the fancy room, swatting a vampire assassain over the head with a table lamp.

“I feel like this is not what Rosario and Tanya meant by being on our best behavior!” Cecil shouts to her over the din, running past her and vaulting over the back of the sofa in pursuit of the coal scuttle.

“Forget about it!” yells Tanya off to his side. The entire crew spills into the room, brandishing what looks like whatever they could find in the van on short notice. There is an extremely old and crusty donut box flying over the heads of those assembled, as well as several pool noodles, a boom mic, Ana’s nunchucks, and a huge sheaf of unpaid parking tickets.

“Never mind, then,” Cecil mutters, and turns back to the task at hand.

The front door flies open, banging violently against the wall as the hurricane does its best to force its way inside. It looks apocalyptic out there, sheets of rain cascading down over the yard and the street beyond, which is steadily working on becoming a river. Cecil definitely sees bodies beginning to wash out of the ground, just in case this all wasn’t hellish enough.

“I left the second Ange called!” yells a very sodden Rick, diving into the melee in the middle of what seems to be every Labrador he owns. The dogs start gleefully biting ankles. “What’s going on?”

“No idea!” Cecil yells back. There’s a small explosion from upstairs. He looks helplessly at Ana, who points at the werewolves and the crew.

“I’ll get everybody out. You deal with whatever that shit is, since you’re so magical now!” she shouts, rattling the van keys.

“Shotgun!” yells Ange the Werewolf, haring after her. They fling open the door and are nearly blown back by the force of the gale.

Everyone more or less gets the memo that something’s going down that they might not want to be present for; the crowd starts to surge out of the door as if it’s a high school party and the cops have just made a surprise appearance. Cecil runs against the crush of people, tripping enemy vampires (and in one unfortunate case, Colin Robinson) as he takes the stairs two at a time. He swings around the doorway of the crypt and stops in his tracks.

Whatever’s brewing in the middle of the salt circle doesn’t look good. Guillermo and Nandor are standing at the edge of it transfixed; Cecil puts a diplomatic but firm hand on Guillermo’s arm.

“It’s going to, uh…” says Nandor, still staring.

“Explode?” Cecil supplies helpfully.

“Yeah, that one.”

“Once you summon it, you have to feed it?”

“Apparently. This isn’t really my area.”

“Guillermo?”

“I have some guesses, but none of them are helpful.”

Nandor tears his eyes away and looks over at the two of them. “I’m going to do something. But once I do it, we all have to run away. Got it?”

Cecil and Guillermo nod, and Nandor extends a foot and breaks the salt circle.

Cecil doesn’t quite know how to describe it, in hindsight, but it seems that the edges of reality seem to fray a bit. It’s like in dreams, when you know you’re in your high school cafeteria even though it looks nothing like your high school cafeteria actually did and also has six narwhals, a mariachi band, and the Tardis in it. Cecil intuits rather than feels that Nandor’s grabbed both him and Guillermo (freaky vampire strength, right) and sort of floats along in the wake as they retreat, almost as if the hurricane’s swamped the whole of Staten Island and they’re all swimming underwater. As they drift down the stairs, it feels as if someone else has gone off the diving board before Cecil’s even surfaced from his own dive—he feels an initial impact, muted and far but definitely there, and the shock waves start to reverberate through the water. Nandor throws Cecil and Guillermo bodily into the room under the stairs; Guillermo starts ransacking the minifridge, presumably for his slaying stash. Cecil’s not sure how effective that’s going to be against possibly-but-not-definitely-God, but A+ for effort. He himself still feels like he’s swimming through custard, which he suspects is an accidental wobbling of the space-time continuum whose implications he really doesn’t want to think about.

Slowly but with a lot of conviction for someone with no fucking clue what he’s doing, Cecil turns to face the doorway and pulls out the amulet from under his t-shirt. He’s unsure of the efficacy, but since it stopped Vladislav from flinging him into the cauldron of the universe, he sort of vaguely holds it aloft and hopes for the best. There’s a roar from the foyer and the normal flow of time returns in an overwhelming rush, as if all the water suddenly got flung out of the pool, leaving them all to crash to the bottom. Guillermo’s the first to his feet; whips open the tassel holding the curtain back and it falls over the doorway, throwing deep shadows over them.

It goes quiet outside for a split second. And then thunder crashes, shaking the whole house.

“Shitballs!” yelps Nandor, reflexively covering his face.

The power goes out. Cecil jumps and definitely treads on Nandor’s foot.

“I think…” he says into the darkness once it’s clear that no one else is going to volunteer any information on the subject, “That we might be a little bit stuck here.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” grumbles Nandor. Then he yelps a little, which Cecil takes to mean that Guillermo has smacked him. Outside, the storm is howling ever louder and house is swaying and creaking in a full-body sort of way. Guillermo starts lighting candles; it’s only when Nandor starts hissing and recoiling that Cecil takes a closer look and realizes that they’ve got the Virgin of Guadalupe on them.

“Deal with it,” Guillermo tells Nandor firmly. Cecil snorts and pulls up the radar on his phone, which seems to suggest that they’ve inadvertently wandered onto Noah’s Ark. Power’s out all over the city and the roads have come to a standstill in the sheets of rain and roaring winds. Cecil thinks of the van’s nonexistent structural integrity and hopes that everyone’s all right. He doesn’t even realize he’s chewing a hangnail until Guillermo swats his hand away; from the look on his face, Guillermo doesn’t realize he was swatting Cecil’s hand away until Cecil makes a grumpy noise in his direction. 

Nandor looks between them and grimaces.

*

And then they sit on the narrow bed. And they wait. And it’s quite possibly the awkwardest thing to ever happen to Cecil, period.

“In the interest of saving the _why the everloving fuck did you think you could summon God?_ question for later, I have a small query for you, Nandor,” he says at last.

“Answer for you, video man?” asks Nandor in confusion.

“Wu-Tang Clan.”

Guillermo cocks his head in bafflement, but Nandor…well, Nandor looks uneasy enough that Cecil knows that he’s 100% called that shit.

“They’re from Staten Island.”

Nandor barely inclines his head in acknowledgment.

“You didn’t by any chance inspire the song “Protect Ya Neck,” did you?”

“The 1990s were a strange and eventful time for me, okay?” whines Nandor, his voice gone just high enough that Cecil knows he’s hit a nerve.

“Just asking, that’s all,” he says smoothly, sitting back with a grin. “Didn’t realize you were in the hip-hop scene.”

Guillermo is making tiny, choked-off noises of surprise and looking at Nandor.

“I enjoyed it very much!” Nandor says defensively, crossing his arms across his chest. “They were very nice and talented young men, the Wu-Tangs.”

“And they twigged you for a vampire.” A horrible suspicion dawns on Cecil. “This isn’t a George Washington situation, is it?”

“A _George Washington situation—_ ” Guillermo practically splutters.

“No further questions!” squawks Nandor.

Cecil shakes his head admiringly. “What a time to be alive.”

*

Gradually, the hurricane begins to recede. The whole house is still kind of vibrating, but Cecil can’t be sure that it’s not just a byproduct of...whatever it was that would otherwise currently be snacking on him had a magic amulet and a pack of werewolves not intervened. As the din outside grows gradually quiet, though, Cecil begins to notice something else. At first, he chalks it up to the flicker of the candlelight. But then, as the minutes tick by, Cecil realizes that Nandor is shaking. He looks to Guillermo for clarification and realizes that Guillermo looks nervous. Like, really nervous.

“What’s going on?”

And then he realizes.

“Shit.” He stares at Nandor. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Two nights ago.”

“Nobody in the cell?”

Nandor shakes his head. “It was supposed to be…” He gestures loosely at Guillermo. That explains Guillermo’s sudden weird-ass interest in vampire bites, at least.

Cecil buries his face in his hands. “I doubt we’d be able to find anyone in the storm. How much longer can you last?”

“Couple of hours,” answers Guillermo softly, eyes never leaving Nandor’s shaking hands.

“Shit.”

“Precisely,” murmurs Nandor, looking from one of them to the other with undisguised hunger. Cecil slowly but firmly touches a fingertip to his nose.

“Cecil, nose-goes is not the way to solve this one,” Guillermo sighs.

“Is too,” Cecil counters, finger still in place. They both look at Nandor, who looks helplessly back.

“This is weird,” Cecil prods when no further direction is forthcoming. He finally lowers his finger.

“This is not the situation I would have chosen for myself, correct,” Nandor snipes, hugging a pillow to his chest. Cecil abstractly wonders whether it’s the beating-off pillow, then decides he really, really doesn’t want to know. “I don’t want to drink either one of you, truth be told.”

“Thanks, man,” Cecil retorts. “I’ll have you know that I’m delicious, by the way.” He considers. “At least, I seemed to be delicious…that guy’s mouth was a little occupied at the time…”

Nandor cocks his head. “When…?”

“Simon’s nightclub. Don’t you remember me sitting in the emergency room bleeding?”

“No, I was preoccupied with--” He stops.

“Guillermo,” finishes Cecil grimly. “I know.”

Nandor looks at Guillermo. “I could turn you.”

Cecil nearly elbows a candle off the table. “ _Pardon?”_

“Not you, video man.”

“Yeah, I got that bit, thanks.” Cecil is about three seconds from a full-on panic attack. Part of him would rather be anywhere but here right now; part of him couldn’t leave if it was a matter of life and death to do so. 

Guillermo takes a shaky breath. “No. I…I can’t.” He looks to the curtain, then back to Cecil with undisguised fear in his eyes. “I think I need to go find Vladislav.” There’s another roll of thunder, but it’s almost soft in comparison to what’s been rattling the foundation for the last few hours.

“Go ahead,” says Cecil softly. “Do what you need to do.” He jerks his head at Nandor. “I’ve got this.” It’s lunacy to even think of going outside in this hurricane, but Cecil knows in his heart of hearts that Guillermo is stubborn as shit and wouldn’t listen anyway.

“There’s Gatorade in the fridge.” Guillermo stands up. He’s clearly going for a dramatic exit, but what with the room being so small and so dim he mostly ends up tripping over Nandor and kicking Cecil in the shins and spilling his bag of stakes. Finally, he vanishes, the curtain swinging shut behind him and throwing wild shadows on the walls.

Nandor and Cecil stare at each other.

“Are you going to leave too?” Nandor asks in a small voice.

Cecil stares. “You think I would…?”

“Abandon a rival in a moment of weakness in order to gain the tactical upper hand? Yes, absolutely.” Nandor is looking at Cecil as if he’s had to explain that the earth goes around the sun.

“Some of us have morals, bud.” Cecil leans over Nandor and pops the fridge open, squinting at the bottles in the gloom within. “What flavor do you want? Arctic Rush or…uh, Red.”

“You’re the one drinking it.”

“ _Technically_ we’re both drinking it _…_ ”

Nandor sighs dramatically and tips his head back to thunk against the wall. It makes a surprisingly loud noise. “You should probably have both.”

So they sit there in silence while Cecil hydrates, the candles burning lower. The Virgin of Guadalupe is most definitely judging the shit out of this whole clusterfuck and Cecil doesn’t blame her one bit. 

“How, do you, uh…want me?” Cecil asks delicately, re-capping the last bottle and setting it on the floor.

It transpires that Nandor wants to spoon him. It’s not a terrible feeling, all things considered, though Cecil could maybe do without their pelvises being quite so flush given what’s about to happen in that region. Nandor slides his arms around Cecil and, to Cecil’s surprise, slips a massive hand into Cecil’s own.

“Squeeze if you need me to stop,” Nandor breathes into Cecil’s ear (well, whatever the vampiric analogue of breathing is, anyway). And, wow, that kind of works for Cecil, in a rather messed-up way. He brings his other hand up and cradles Nandor’s hand in between them.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Go ahead.” Nandor nods once, curtly, and brings his other hand up to cradle Cecil’s head and tilt it to the side. There’s the barest brush of lips against Cecil’s neck; Cecil begins, just barely, to freak the fuck out. And then Nandor bites down. 

Like last time, the fangs breaching his skin hurt like a _bitch._ He gasps and stiffens and reminds himself not to clutch prematurely at Nandor’s hand.

“Don’t make me a vampire,” he grits out through the pain exploding white behind his eyelids. Nandor pauses. Cecil’s thoughts are flailing wildly—why did he say that, he has no idea why he said that, Christ on a _bicycle_ this is weird and also _ow,_ Nandor’s fangs are even sharper than the other guy’s--

And then, in the stillness, Nandor squeezes Cecil’s trembling, clammy hand in reassurance. Cecil lets out a shaky breath and tries to relax.

And then Nandor begins to drink.

It feels different than last time. Cecil doesn’t really want to examine those feelings too closely, but evidently certain parts of his anatomy do, very much. Now that he’s expecting it (and, y’know, hasn’t just been jumped in a nightclub), the rush of pleasure comes on fast and hard, dragging him under pretty much instantaneously. He realizes he’s making noise, just soft and breathy little sounds—and that Nandor is making noise back, murmured little whimpers against Cecil’s neck. Cecil is trying so unbelievably hard not to writhe, but it feels so unbelievably good, cradled in Nandor’s arms with a blissful ache roaring through him and Nandor’s own interest very apparent against the back of Cecil’s thigh.

But fuck him, he’s crying too. He feels caught between two poles, inescapably: the building wave of hormones threatening to break over him at any moment and the maelstrom of grief trying to drag him under. He feels his grip on reality begin to slacken a little bit, his fingertips tingling and white spots exploding behind his vision.

He squeezes Nandor’s hand, hard.

Nandor squeezes his hand back and stops.

The dismount is gentler this time around; Nandor does something nifty with the angle of his mouth and the way he’s holding Cecil’s neck that lets him slip out almost undetected. Cecil supposes that in seven hundred years one must get a lot of practice. The departing lick almost undoes him entirely, wound-up as he is.

“Did you get enough?” Cecil asks. He’s hoarse, suddenly. Nandor nods.

“Did you come?” Nandor murmurs against his neck, fingers twining into Cecil’s. His lips are wet.

Cecil squeezes his eyes shut. “No.”

“Do you want to?”

Cecil outright _whines_ at that one and wiggles back against Nandor. “ _God_ yes.”

“I’ll forgive you that one little blasphemy, considering that I did just drink your blood,” Nandor murmurs, low and tender, as he slides his hand out from under Cecil’s neck. Maybe, just maybe, Cecil gets what Guillermo sees in this guy.

“How—oh, _please, Christ_ —how do I taste?” he half-gasps as Nandor takes his hand out of Cecil’s grasp and trails it southward. 

“ _Sweet,”_ growls Nandor, making short work of Cecil’s belt.

Even if nothing else comes of it, Cecil will go to his grave with a certain amount of smug satisfaction that a sexy seven-hundred-and-fifty-year-old warlord vampire got him off. It transpires that even the dumbest of vampires acquires mad handjob skills over the course of centuries of doing the nasty. Cecil tilts his head back against Nandor’s shoulder and tries to remember how to breathe.

“Good?” Nandor asks archly, just in case Cecil has forgotten that he is a smug, smug bastard. (Confession: Cecil totally has).

“Shut up,” Cecil gasps, and comes.

Wonder of wonders, Nandor holds him afterwards and they both doze off.

*

“What time is it?” Cecil murmurs, groggy.

“Daylight,” says Nandor into his hair, sounding entirely lucid. Cecil squints. He can’t tell if there’s actually watery light pressing around the edges of the curtain or it’s a blood-loss-induced hallucination. He checks his watch. Not quite sunrise, but close enough; the shortest night of the year has drawn to a close. He fumbles around for his phone. Absolutely no service whatsoever. He has no idea whether that’s attributable to the hurricane or to the truly spectacular amount of supernatural bullshit that went down last night.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asks Nandor.

“As long as you don’t put me into the light.” There’s a tinge of fear in Nandor’s voice.

“Asshole, do you really think I would fry you to a crisp?” Cecil sighs and nestles back against Nandor. If they’re going to be stuck here, he might as well get a cuddle out of it. Cecil can practically hear Nandor’s eyeroll, but he notices that Nandor doesn’t complain. “How much darkness do you need, exactly? Like, how many photons would grill you? I’ve seen you walk around the house in daylight, so clearly there’s a number. Are there variations depending on the wavelength? Are you like a roll of film in a camera that’s been opened prematurely and whether you get ruined depends on how far the back opened and how fast you shut it and what frame number you’re on and your ISO and--”

“There aren’t experiments on that shit!”

“You know, I bet there totally are. We have the technology…”

Nandor lets his forehead thunk onto Cecil’s shoulder. “You did something back there…” he says, very clearly changing the subject.

“Uh, protective amulet.” He’s not quite sure how much to reveal and how much to conceal, but then it occurs to him that he’s currently spooning a vampire who just drank his blood and then brought him off and maybe he’s got some bigger fish to fry at the moment. “From Lilith. There may or may not have also been a magical bath involved. And I suspect that some of these things are psychosomatic, anyway.” He sits up and fumbles around for a lighter and a fresh candle. The flame flares up to reveal St. Bartholomew on the glass.

“Skinned alive. Nice,” says Cecil, setting down the lighter. Gory Catholic trivia knowledge dies hard. He tears his eyes away from the long-suffering saint and scrutinizes Nandor. “Could you turn into a bat? I could get you out of here that way? Maybe hide in the minifridge while I leave and figure out the lighting situation in the foyer?”

“That’s my undying life you’ll gambling with when you try to figure out the lighting situation!” gasps Nandor, affronted.

Cecil fixes him with a glare. “It just so happens that my understanding of the lighting situation constitutes my entire livelihood.”

“Is this some kind of shit metaphor about Guillermo?”

“No, but…good shout, actually. And there’s some strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that I…well, I can see things. Not very well, maybe, but…” He falls silent.

Nandor sizes him up. “What kinds of things?”

“Guillermo glowing, like a saint.” He decides on principle not to mention the precise set of conditions during which that particular phenomenon arose. “And I could scry in the fire, which apparently is unusual. And…” he hesitates. “Well...I think I know where Guillermo went. But I don’t know how to get there.”

Nandor sighs heavily. “I think we’re shit out of paddles.”

Cecil lets that one go over the plate. He pulls the amulet out his back pocket and tilts it back and forth in the candlelight. “You could say that.”

“Wait,” Nandor sits up, staring at Cecil’s hands as if bewitched. “I have an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Have you ever traveled through the ether?” 


End file.
